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I see backtick ( ` ) (also called a grave accent) characters mixed with apostrophe characters ( ' ) used together in all kinds of command-line output. Surely the reason/history behind why is documented online somewhere, but I couldn't find where.

Here are a couple examples of what I'm talking about:

From the make man page:

If makefile is `-', the standard input is read.

Some rake output:

.../ruby_koans/koans/about_strings.rb:6:in `test_double_quoted_strings_are_strings'

Why the inconsistency?

I suppose the broader question here is "Why not use 'proper' single or double quotation marks, as appropriate?" but I realize that the apostrophe (and the grave accent) are simply more available on "standard" U.S. keyboards. Why that is, though...)

ele
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    The apostrophe is really the only single quote mark in ASCII. In a some typewriter fonts, though, the apostrophe tilts to the right so typists sometimes used the grave accent and single quote/apostrophe to "dress things up" and make it look a wee bit more like typeset text - kind of silly, if you ask me. As to why the same character isn't used at both ends in this case? I assume it is to give a clue that the outermost quotes are not part of the quoted material (which may itself be a quoted string of some kind). Or, maybe whoever established the standard was just one of those silly typists. – William Mar 13 '13 at 16:22

1 Answers1

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This had already been asked and answered on Programmers (now deleted). The top answer was a best guess that it came from LaTeX.

A similar question has also been answered on SE English Language & Usage. The top answer was that it was to work around limited character sets, which lacked separate characters for ‘this style of quotation marks’.

Community
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Jon Cairns
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