Yes, I know who Sun Ra is. Because I didn't see ^Ra$ in my list of common nouns then it means that there hasn't been a comment just about Ra. But now there has: Ra. Ra. Ra. 4 times total now :-)
By default your keyboard double-quote key produces the ascii double quote mark, and that is what's used for quoting in virtually every programming language.
Word and many email clients will use smart-quotes by default, but they're pretty rare in programming, hence why the "some among us" phrasing calling them out as strange.
That's what the linked repo is referring to by soft quotes, and the command given specifically uses 0x201d above.
Why do we call them "hot dogs" when they typically have a very low percentage of dog meat (often 0% I think)? Why do we call it a "gravy boat" when it's not literally a boat? Did you know there are male ladybugs?
Language is descriptive, and people do in fact call them smart quotes. That doesn't mean there has to be anything smart about them, and I'm not making the claim there is, I'm just using an agreed-upon term to convey what I'm talking about.
Cause it's shaped like a simple boat. Or sort of is. Kind of like how 'soft quotes' are considered soft because they aren't in a very hard like up and down position, and are instead positioned like a feather softly falling. (or so I guess)
> Why do we call them "hot dogs" when they typically have a very low percentage of dog meat
Because historically, the insinuation was that cheap sausages contained dog meat, that’s why.
Someone has answered your gravyboat question.
And your ladybug example is bordering on blatant troll baiting.
> Language is descriptive, and people do in fact call them smart quotes. That doesn't mean there has to
Some “people” call them ATM machines even though the M stands for machine.
> I'm just using an agreed-upon term to convey what I'm talking about.
The agreed upon terms are Left Double Quotation Mark and Right Double Quotation Mark - nothing about smart quotes in the Unicode tables.
I get that the term smart is used colloquially - but your comment suggests that their Unicode names are “smart”.
I do think it is overall silly and confusing to refer to the characters themselves based on some formatting or automatic insertion feature.
Smart quotes really refers the feature some software has where it automatically detects what type of quote should be used (opening or closing) and puts that in so you can just use the same quote key at the beginning and end and it'll substitute in the right "smart quote".
Why is OP describing that as “disturbing” (I type with “smart” quotes)? It’s not intentional; it’s just because I’m on an iPhone.[a] On the default keyboard, if I want "dumb" quotes, I have to tap and hold the key to get the popup. Simply tapping the quote key is less effort.
[a]: On my computers, I’ll use "dumb" quotes. Easy way to see where I typed a comment from, I guess.
I'm upvoting you, because calling it disturbing really doesn't make sense unless egotism is involved. IMHO.
If someone can explain why it's not just egotism, please go right ahead. Otherwise, it really does seem like it. To me at least.
Other comments try to sort of deal with this problem in their explanations about soft and hard quotes, but they don't really deal with the part about it being disturbing.
What's so disturbing about using a feature available on your device? Especially when it does nothing harmful to the user, or recipients of that users communications?
A good-faith interpretation would be that "disturbing" is meant more lightly than that. It's more like saying use of tabs (or spaces) is "disturbing". It is a cultural disagreement on surface level, but not _really_ a disagreement if you were to probe further (I doubt the author thinks people are literally disturbed if they use soft quotes).
Further, if you check my sibling comment you'll see that it is a common mistake for beginner/intermediate coders to paste these quotes into code. This is the source of the "cultural debate" in this instance. They are making a judgement about how this common copy/paste problem shows up in practice. Not a judgement about "proper usage".
It's honestly a little surprising that you took this so personally. It reads rather playfully in my opinion.
> Why is OP describing that as “disturbing” (I type with “smart” quotes)? It’s not intentional; it’s just because I’m on an iPhone.[a] On the default keyboard, if I want "dumb" quotes, I have to tap and hold the key to get the popup. Simply tapping the quote key is less effort.
I never knew you could do that! I've got very frustrated sometimes typing on an iPad when I really want a dumb quote, and, unlike on macOS where the dumb quote is the default and there's the convenient if baffling OPT-[ shortcut to get “ and OPT-SHIFT-[ for ”, I couldn't figure out what to do to my default smart quote to get a dumb quote. Thanks!
It is simply because they present a commonly encountered scenario where you mistakenly paste them into your code. Not something I encounter much lately but definitely tripped me up in my early years.
You can also just turn them off completely. IIRC Android also does it by default. It's one of the first things I look for on a new device, along with disabling haptic feedback and stupid sound effects.
Speculation, but two causes could be:
- Writing in a plaintext editor before copying into HN.
- Using a third party HN client that only supports plaintext. For example, I imagine there might be at least a few people out there who might access HN from a terminal client?
> Writing in a plaintext editor before copying into HN
Yes, I think it is a thing where people type into Microsoft Word (or similar). Given how moving around the web can cause text in fields to be lost, I don't blame them. But it was a surprising discovery for sure.
Mobile devices is my guess. For example, iOS by default does not use straight ASCII quote, all quotes are "typographically-correct" curly quotes, pretty much in conformance of Apple design-obsessive reputation.
It’s the default substitution done on iOS devices - the OS used on the most widely used smartphone in the US - this is a lot more common among HN users than copying and pasting out of MS Word??
Several commenters have pointed out these defects in the regexes reported in the article, and you’ve replied by telling us that, in addition to all its other faults, it misrepresents the code it’s supposedly describing; in my case going as far as to tell me that I’m wrong. This whole thing is wasting the time of anyone who makes the mistake of thinking it might be interesting.
This has been driving me nuts for decades: "Smart Quotes" first appeared as the name of a feature of interactive document editing tools, wherein the user would always keyboard the "vertical" single or double quote ASCII character, and the software would look at the context of where that quote character was being inserted, and choose the correct "left-quote" or "right-quote" character to actually insert into the document.
Unfortunately, users (and product managers of competitors) misinterpreted the label in the check-box in the UI that enabled this feature, and thought that "Smart Quotes" meant that the name of the quote characters somehow had the word "smart" in it. But, no, it just meant "turn on the intelligent logic for which quote to insert into the document."
Source: Me, 1988 or so, working on FrameMaker. I don't think there's a reference to the word pair "Smart Quotes" anywhere earlier than the FrameMaker ~2 manual, and certainly not in any book on typography. I'd be happy to learn that I am wrong, if anybody has a pointer.
TeX (as a mostly batch formatter) didn't do this, but it did map ASCII quote characters to the typesetting ones. Including mapping a sequence of two single quote or backquote characters to the typeset double quotes.
(FrameMaker was great, BTW. It was what got me into developing fancy layout style sheets and templates, which I later also did with Interleaf, MS Word, LaTeX, and various Web stuff. Somewhere in there, I worked on DynaText and DynaWeb at EBT, so overlapped a bit with Frame as it got into SGML.)
Interestingly, the logic of mapping of two single quotes into a double quote was not built into TeX; rather, the metadata in each of the standard fonts simply used the ligature mechanism to handle it, just as they would specify that "f" followed by "t" should turn into the single-character "ft" ligature.
It's a shame that ASCII (and its visual representation on terminals from most manufacturers) has a wonderfully slanty left-quote character, but the right-quote character is typically shown as vertical. This makes TeX input files that contain quotations look kind of yucky, which is all the more galling as the original SAIL terminals had symmetric quotes, so everything looked beautiful there (never mind also having proper uparrow and downarrow characters to indicate superscript and subscript, rather than the ugly caret and underscore characters that we're all stuck with in ASCII-land TeX).
Source: Me, 1980 or so, working on TeX and Metafont.
I suspect if you dug back you'd find that very old monospace fonts had ` and ' looking like mirrors of each other, but once they realized that nobody uses ` and instead always uses ' and ", they made them vertical so that they wouldn't look "that bad".
In the old days of ASCII several characters were heavily overloaded. On teletypes it was not unusual to create accented characters by typing ` or ' (which looked more like ´), then backspacing and typing a vowel, to get (e.g.) è or é. The same could be done with ~ to create ñ, if the tilde were high up like ˜, or with " to simulate an umlaut.
And of course there’s the overload of hyphen and minus, such that Unicode gave up and named U+002D “hyphen‐minus,” and created two separate characters U+2212 “minus” (−) and U+2010 “hyphen” (‐) to use in situations where the typography matters. Most fonts seem to use identical glyphs for hyphen‐minus and minus, but I’ve seen some that try to split the difference, giving hyphen‐minus a glyph with a height and width somewhere in between hyphen and minus.
If you find minus and hyphen‐minus hard to distinguish visually, just remember that a true minus sign looks just like a plus without the vertical part. Compare the alignments:
And typewriters, before that. They all had only a single key for Apostrophe as well as Single Left Quote and Single Right Quote. In fact, since most(?) manual typewriters also lacked a "One / Exclamation" key, there was a fourth use: for "1" you typed lower-case L (yikes); while to get an exclamation point, you had to type a period, then backspace, then overstrike with an apostrophe (which is yet another reason the apostrophe et. al. character was vertical!)
KeenWrite[0] is my free, open-source plain text Markdown editor that exports to XHTML. That XHTML is passed into ConTeXt (typesetting software) to produce beautifully typeset PDFs. On the way from Markdown to XHTML, KeenWrite passes the XHTML through KeenQuotes[1], my straight quote curling library, to encode quotation marks as HTML entities. This means ' becomes lsquo, rsquo, or apos, depending on the context (pun intended, sorry).
Those HTML entities are then curled correctly when any theme[2] is applied.
What bytes is not having a separate glyph for a curled apostrophe because it makes detection of British (or nested) quotations a difficult chore for natural language processors. To get a curled apostrophe, word processors inject the semantically incorrect right-curled single quote, which ought to be reserved for a closing quotation mark exclusively.
There are a few fonts that do curl the apostrophe, such as GFS Didot[3].
About your middle paragraph: note that ASCII doesn't have left and right quotes; at 0x60 it has GRAVE ACCENT ` (not a left quote), and at 0x27 it has APOSTROPHE ' (not a right quote). Unfortunately for many years, fonts and terminals (like the SAIL ones you mentioned) continued to encourage abusing these characters as symmetric left- and right-quotes (as they were in some character sets pre-ASCII and even an early version of ASCII), despite their updated definitions.
That’s the Unicode way of doing things (which I heartily subscribe to), but in ASCII’s original conception what you describe as “abuse” was a feature. For instance, in RFC 20 which is dated 1969, 0x27 is named “Apostrophe (Closing Single Quotation Mark/Acute Accent)” and 0x60 is named “Grave Accent (Opening Single Quotation Mark)”. Additionally, double quote also served as a diaeresis, and comma as a cedilla.
Of course, your links are right: it makes no sense to overload these characters anymore now that we have character sets and software capable of providing typographic niceties. But it’s fun to know the history.
Yeah, no. ASCII assuredly has had what it officially called "opening single quotation mark" at 0x40, and "closing single quotation mark" at 0x27, for a very long time.
For starters, most easily at hand, see Communications of the ACM, Vol. 8, No. 4, April 1965, page 207, which shows them by those names.
Of course, there are details. It says that the 0x40 character can also be used as a grave accent, but only if "preceded by an alphabetic character and a BS (Backspace) in that sequence." Oh, for the days of hard-copy terminals.
And 0x27 is worse. It is documented there to be used as Apostrophe, closing single quotation mark, and even acute accent (but again, only in the context of the three character sequence alpha-backspace-accent).
Fine, that was 1965, and no controversy. But following the actual ANSI standard along over the years, by 2007 they're still there in "Coded Character Sets - 7-Bit American National Standard Code for Information Interchange (7-Bit ASCII)" ANSI INCITS 4-1986 (R2007) / ANSI X3.4-1986 (R2007), Approved June 14, 2007; Table 7, page 12. (Well, in 1986 they'd been slightly renamed to be Left and Right Single Quotation Mark, so the names would make sense for right-to-left languages, too; just as Paren, Bracket, and Brace pairs had all also changed names from "Open/Close" to "Left/Right".) The subsequent revisions to the ASCII standard, of June 15, 2012 and November 2, 2017, I don't have copies of, but these character designations clearly lasted at least into the "updated definitions" current as of mid 2012.
So, left and right single quotes were clearly in the official standard for almost five full decades beyond "early ASCII". I expect that they survive still, and will soon go into their seventh decade, but happy to hear otherwise from anyone with access to the later standard documents.
(And, yes, of course the Unicode standard has its own (no doubt better) opinions about what goes on with the first 128 characters out of tens of thousands, and what they're called and what they're properly used for; but that's a different issue than what the ASCII standard itself has to say about cramming stuff into its overloaded character set with a grand total of 128 slots.)
Yeah you're right and good point, and my earlier comment was partly misleading anyway, because there isn't much difference even among typographers between "apostrophe" and "right single quotation mark".
A better way of stating it is to start with appearance: people who started with computers where 0x40 ` and 0x27 ' looked symmetric (like ‘ and ’) would likely end up using them as symmetric quotation marks (thus the conventions used in some software like Emacs and TeX), while everyone else, where they were not symmetric (looking slanted and vertical respectively) would likely not be led down that route. It's a bit unfortunate that there was this divergence, and that it wasn't settled early enough.
An interesting example is The TeXbook itself: the 1979 TeX manual (in the "TeX and METAFONT" book), the precursor to The TeXbook and apparently written with mostly the SAIL environment in mind, simply says (early in Chapter 2):
> In the first place, there are two kinds of quotation marks in books, but only one kind on the typewriter. Even on your computer terminal, which has more characters than an ordinary typewriter, you probably have only a non-oriented double quote mark (") because the standard “ascii” code for computers was not invented with book publishing in mind. However, your terminal probably does have two flavors of single-quote marks, namely ’ and ’, which you can get by typing ` and ´. The second of these is useful also as an apostrophe.
While already in 1984, The TeXbook (second printing, October 1984: the earliest I have access to), written with more awareness of the rest of the world, has more-or-less the same text, but adds:
> American keyboards usually contain a left-quote character that shows up as something like `, and an apostrophe or right-quote that looks like ' or ´.
So already the appearance did differ across different systems.
I think “smart quotes” is fine as a name, since most people who type them still do it automatically via a context-based logic (whether it’s a word processor or text box input on an iPhone). And it works better than “curly quotes” since they are not curly in some fonts.
If you’re going to be pedantic, I’m not sure that “left-quote” or “right-quote” is correct either. Shouldn’t it be “left double quotation mark” or “right double quotation mark”?
I know you said “most people”, but I always type these typographically correct quotes manually (no automatic substitution or “smart” quotes involved). It's Opt+[ (etc) on macOS, for example. So the name is disorienting for me at least, and as the top comment said, they predate computers and weren't called “smart” then.
If you learn them as "double quote brackets" just like "round brackets", "square brackets", "angle brackets", and "curly brackets" then the key name is not disorienting.
As a Brit I always used to interpret "Smart Quotes" with the old-fashioned definition of smart that some people still use here, i.e. presentable, nice-looking, clean-cut.
On Linux I use Fcitx and Ctrl+Shift+Alt+U to open the Unicode character picker, while on Windows I have my fork of a character picker discovered a while ago (https://github.com/flobosg/character-picker) bound to the same shortcut.
read up on the compose key it may change your life for the better. or it may be difficult to replicate on windows/wayland leading to additional stress in your life. or perhaps you enjoy your current setup, which does not sound half bad, although not as good as the compose key.
Most linux desktops are different and more complicated but here is how I set mine up on openbsd.
pick a key that is handy but you don't use much, for me this was the context menu key, on many european keyboards there is an altgr key set aside for this exact use case.
in ~/.xsession add a line like "xmodmap -e 'keysym Menu = Multi_key'"
create a file ~/.XCompose to setup your own compose sequences. mine looks like
#load system compose files
include "%L"
<Multi_key> <w> <e> <b> : "\xf0\x9f\x95\xb8" # spiderweb
read /usr/X11R6/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose to get a feel for the existing compose sequences.
I do the same, except instead of xmodmap I use “setxkbmap -option compose:ralt” (plus a few other options) as described in the xkeyboard-config(7) manpage. It has some useful features: https://man.openbsd.org/xkeyboard-config.7
I am aware of the Compose key, but have yet to find a good key to map to it (I use AltGr for third and fourth level characters already). I’ll keep it in mind in case my setup breaks down in the future.
Conventions can be changed. It is not intrinsically, objectively superior to have two separate glyphs for a starting and ending quotation mark. I'd argue the opposite. It is needless complexity. Let us jettison it and embrace the simpler single glyph.
Disingenuous argument is disingenuous. To make that argument properly, you must also argue for putting both quotation marks on the keyboard as first class keys. And you must retro-actively revise ASCII to include them as first class characters.
They might be typographically correct, but they are incorrect for code, and cause so many issues. I'd rather have typographically incorrect quotes that work everywhere.
It's true that people wouldn't use them on their own, but there are a lot of cases (especially blog software, automatic ebook formatting etc), where code examples get messed up subtly by software changing code quotes to standard quotes, often invisibly. The same for minus signs vs dashes.
This is the first time I'm hearing the term 'smart quotes' or 'soft quotes'. I googled to see what it is and all I got was some 'smart' quotes. There's an obscure Wiktionary page on smart quotes which also does not really explain what it is. The GitHub page being linked itself is so vague and cryptic it's hard to understand what is even talked about.
To all those who are confused, smart quotes or soft quotes are those context aware quote marks that some word processors insert which depending on context, will put either closing or opening quote marks.
I just type them in? On a Mac it’s as difficult to type a typographically correct quote as it is to type a dumb quote, just a modifier and a key. OK, so it’s not labelled, but if you know how, why wouldn’t you?
> There are 126,000+ quotations on HackerNews using smart quotes. I find this deeply disturbing.
Mobile devices appear to do this by default. iOS in my case anyway. I turned them off because it was messing up my hugo blog's frontmatter whenever I start a post on mobile.
You have prompted me to check how to turn it off on iOS. Under settings>general>keyboard, un-toggle "smart punctuation". It also turns off tuning "--" into an em dash. Not sure what else it disables.
This is kind of sloppy; some of the conclusions don’t follow from the data, because the regexes aren’t carefully constructed. I didn’t read much of it, but in the first one he’s captured all sentences beginning with Intelligent, Intellectual, Intelligence, etc. This could have been made more precise by just including a [. ] after Intel.
84 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 98.8 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1ToFXHW5pg
iOS at the least by default will substitute "dumb" quotes with smart quotes in text boxes.
This is a double quote: ", 0x22, ascii
This is a smart open quote: “, 0x201c, unicode
This is a smart close quote: ”, 0x201d, unicode
By default your keyboard double-quote key produces the ascii double quote mark, and that is what's used for quoting in virtually every programming language.
Word and many email clients will use smart-quotes by default, but they're pretty rare in programming, hence why the "some among us" phrasing calling them out as strange.
That's what the linked repo is referring to by soft quotes, and the command given specifically uses 0x201d above.
And I don’t see how one is any “softer” than the other.
People’s programming editors often do paren matching - does that make them smart parens? No they’re still just regular old parens.
Language is descriptive, and people do in fact call them smart quotes. That doesn't mean there has to be anything smart about them, and I'm not making the claim there is, I'm just using an agreed-upon term to convey what I'm talking about.
Cause it's shaped like a simple boat. Or sort of is. Kind of like how 'soft quotes' are considered soft because they aren't in a very hard like up and down position, and are instead positioned like a feather softly falling. (or so I guess)
Because historically, the insinuation was that cheap sausages contained dog meat, that’s why. Someone has answered your gravyboat question. And your ladybug example is bordering on blatant troll baiting.
> Language is descriptive, and people do in fact call them smart quotes. That doesn't mean there has to
Some “people” call them ATM machines even though the M stands for machine.
> I'm just using an agreed-upon term to convey what I'm talking about.
The agreed upon terms are Left Double Quotation Mark and Right Double Quotation Mark - nothing about smart quotes in the Unicode tables.
I get that the term smart is used colloquially - but your comment suggests that their Unicode names are “smart”. I do think it is overall silly and confusing to refer to the characters themselves based on some formatting or automatic insertion feature.
i.e. - the quotes are smart because they adapt to your region.
For example: 10° 33' 19" -> 10° 33« 19». Very smart!
A PM somewhere probably thought "smart quotes" sounded neat, and here we are.
[a]: On my computers, I’ll use "dumb" quotes. Easy way to see where I typed a comment from, I guess.
If someone can explain why it's not just egotism, please go right ahead. Otherwise, it really does seem like it. To me at least.
Other comments try to sort of deal with this problem in their explanations about soft and hard quotes, but they don't really deal with the part about it being disturbing.
What's so disturbing about using a feature available on your device? Especially when it does nothing harmful to the user, or recipients of that users communications?
Further, if you check my sibling comment you'll see that it is a common mistake for beginner/intermediate coders to paste these quotes into code. This is the source of the "cultural debate" in this instance. They are making a judgement about how this common copy/paste problem shows up in practice. Not a judgement about "proper usage".
It's honestly a little surprising that you took this so personally. It reads rather playfully in my opinion.
I never knew you could do that! I've got very frustrated sometimes typing on an iPad when I really want a dumb quote, and, unlike on macOS where the dumb quote is the default and there's the convenient if baffling OPT-[ shortcut to get “ and OPT-SHIFT-[ for ”, I couldn't figure out what to do to my default smart quote to get a dumb quote. Thanks!
Yes, I think it is a thing where people type into Microsoft Word (or similar). Given how moving around the web can cause text in fields to be lost, I don't blame them. But it was a surprising discovery for sure.
Unfortunately, users (and product managers of competitors) misinterpreted the label in the check-box in the UI that enabled this feature, and thought that "Smart Quotes" meant that the name of the quote characters somehow had the word "smart" in it. But, no, it just meant "turn on the intelligent logic for which quote to insert into the document."
Source: Me, 1988 or so, working on FrameMaker. I don't think there's a reference to the word pair "Smart Quotes" anywhere earlier than the FrameMaker ~2 manual, and certainly not in any book on typography. I'd be happy to learn that I am wrong, if anybody has a pointer.
(FrameMaker was great, BTW. It was what got me into developing fancy layout style sheets and templates, which I later also did with Interleaf, MS Word, LaTeX, and various Web stuff. Somewhere in there, I worked on DynaText and DynaWeb at EBT, so overlapped a bit with Frame as it got into SGML.)
It's a shame that ASCII (and its visual representation on terminals from most manufacturers) has a wonderfully slanty left-quote character, but the right-quote character is typically shown as vertical. This makes TeX input files that contain quotations look kind of yucky, which is all the more galling as the original SAIL terminals had symmetric quotes, so everything looked beautiful there (never mind also having proper uparrow and downarrow characters to indicate superscript and subscript, rather than the ugly caret and underscore characters that we're all stuck with in ASCII-land TeX).
Source: Me, 1980 or so, working on TeX and Metafont.
And of course there’s the overload of hyphen and minus, such that Unicode gave up and named U+002D “hyphen‐minus,” and created two separate characters U+2212 “minus” (−) and U+2010 “hyphen” (‐) to use in situations where the typography matters. Most fonts seem to use identical glyphs for hyphen‐minus and minus, but I’ve seen some that try to split the difference, giving hyphen‐minus a glyph with a height and width somewhere in between hyphen and minus.
If you find minus and hyphen‐minus hard to distinguish visually, just remember that a true minus sign looks just like a plus without the vertical part. Compare the alignments:
- example (U+002D hyphen‐minus)
+ example (plus)
− example (U+2212 minus)
Those HTML entities are then curled correctly when any theme[2] is applied.
What bytes is not having a separate glyph for a curled apostrophe because it makes detection of British (or nested) quotations a difficult chore for natural language processors. To get a curled apostrophe, word processors inject the semantically incorrect right-curled single quote, which ought to be reserved for a closing quotation mark exclusively.
There are a few fonts that do curl the apostrophe, such as GFS Didot[3].
[0]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite
[1]: https://whitemagicsoftware.com/keenquotes/
[2]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes/blob/main/xht...
[3]: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/GFS+Didot
See Markus Kahn's page at https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html which explains it well. (Also: the one-page documentation (plus one page implementation) of the LaTeX “upquote” package: http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/upquote/upquote... )
Of course, your links are right: it makes no sense to overload these characters anymore now that we have character sets and software capable of providing typographic niceties. But it’s fun to know the history.
For starters, most easily at hand, see Communications of the ACM, Vol. 8, No. 4, April 1965, page 207, which shows them by those names.
Of course, there are details. It says that the 0x40 character can also be used as a grave accent, but only if "preceded by an alphabetic character and a BS (Backspace) in that sequence." Oh, for the days of hard-copy terminals.
And 0x27 is worse. It is documented there to be used as Apostrophe, closing single quotation mark, and even acute accent (but again, only in the context of the three character sequence alpha-backspace-accent).
Fine, that was 1965, and no controversy. But following the actual ANSI standard along over the years, by 2007 they're still there in "Coded Character Sets - 7-Bit American National Standard Code for Information Interchange (7-Bit ASCII)" ANSI INCITS 4-1986 (R2007) / ANSI X3.4-1986 (R2007), Approved June 14, 2007; Table 7, page 12. (Well, in 1986 they'd been slightly renamed to be Left and Right Single Quotation Mark, so the names would make sense for right-to-left languages, too; just as Paren, Bracket, and Brace pairs had all also changed names from "Open/Close" to "Left/Right".) The subsequent revisions to the ASCII standard, of June 15, 2012 and November 2, 2017, I don't have copies of, but these character designations clearly lasted at least into the "updated definitions" current as of mid 2012.
So, left and right single quotes were clearly in the official standard for almost five full decades beyond "early ASCII". I expect that they survive still, and will soon go into their seventh decade, but happy to hear otherwise from anyone with access to the later standard documents.
(And, yes, of course the Unicode standard has its own (no doubt better) opinions about what goes on with the first 128 characters out of tens of thousands, and what they're called and what they're properly used for; but that's a different issue than what the ASCII standard itself has to say about cramming stuff into its overloaded character set with a grand total of 128 slots.)
A better way of stating it is to start with appearance: people who started with computers where 0x40 ` and 0x27 ' looked symmetric (like ‘ and ’) would likely end up using them as symmetric quotation marks (thus the conventions used in some software like Emacs and TeX), while everyone else, where they were not symmetric (looking slanted and vertical respectively) would likely not be led down that route. It's a bit unfortunate that there was this divergence, and that it wasn't settled early enough.
An interesting example is The TeXbook itself: the 1979 TeX manual (in the "TeX and METAFONT" book), the precursor to The TeXbook and apparently written with mostly the SAIL environment in mind, simply says (early in Chapter 2):
> In the first place, there are two kinds of quotation marks in books, but only one kind on the typewriter. Even on your computer terminal, which has more characters than an ordinary typewriter, you probably have only a non-oriented double quote mark (") because the standard “ascii” code for computers was not invented with book publishing in mind. However, your terminal probably does have two flavors of single-quote marks, namely ’ and ’, which you can get by typing ` and ´. The second of these is useful also as an apostrophe.
While already in 1984, The TeXbook (second printing, October 1984: the earliest I have access to), written with more awareness of the rest of the world, has more-or-less the same text, but adds:
> American keyboards usually contain a left-quote character that shows up as something like `, and an apostrophe or right-quote that looks like ' or ´.
So already the appearance did differ across different systems.
There's a bit more on another related page of Kuhn at https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/apostrophe.html (this one is about the opposite problem: Europeans using acute accent as apostrophe), and there's a bit more about history of these two ASCII positions at https://jkorpela.fi/latin1/ascii-hist.html
If you’re going to be pedantic, I’m not sure that “left-quote” or “right-quote” is correct either. Shouldn’t it be “left double quotation mark” or “right double quotation mark”?
But see also https://smartquotesforsmartpeople.com/ :-)
“一個句子”
In that sense I think "straight quotes" are fine too, although “smart quotes” arguably look a bit nicer, but that's a matter of personal taste IMO.
Related comment from a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31792626
On PC I have AutoHotKey bindings for German and English quotes, single and double, and I'm usually using them.
Most linux desktops are different and more complicated but here is how I set mine up on openbsd.
pick a key that is handy but you don't use much, for me this was the context menu key, on many european keyboards there is an altgr key set aside for this exact use case.
in ~/.xsession add a line like "xmodmap -e 'keysym Menu = Multi_key'"
create a file ~/.XCompose to setup your own compose sequences. mine looks like
read /usr/X11R6/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose to get a feel for the existing compose sequences.According to an ancient convention.
Conventions can be changed. It is not intrinsically, objectively superior to have two separate glyphs for a starting and ending quotation mark. I'd argue the opposite. It is needless complexity. Let us jettison it and embrace the simpler single glyph.
To all those who are confused, smart quotes or soft quotes are those context aware quote marks that some word processors insert which depending on context, will put either closing or opening quote marks.
“ = option + [
” = option + shift + [
‘ = option + ]
’ = option + shift + ]
There’s a few others I use regularly as well:
… = option + ;
– (en dash) = option + -
— (em dash) = option + shift + -
Then there’s a bunch of accent meta keys, so you can use option + c for façade, option + e, e for fiancé, and option + u, i for naïve.
Mobile devices appear to do this by default. iOS in my case anyway. I turned them off because it was messing up my hugo blog's frontmatter whenever I start a post on mobile.
And specifically, "nouns" here are defined by this regex: https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/library/blob/main/scripts/m...
This is simply not true. Look at the files in the repo directly
Intel is ^Intel$. The nouns are separated by word boundaries