[afthonos]

I’m going to be a bit snobbish here: I can’t take the article seriously when it misquotes “Double, double toil and trouble” as “Bubble, bubble toil and trouble”. Not so much because the mistake is egregious (it could make sense if you’re going by ear), but because the article claims to be about the language used, and this is one of the most famous lines in the play.

[gerdesj]

Sod that mate. The real problem is the weird quotes thing hereabouts. English uses 66 and 99 or this:". We never use double backticks and whatever the other thing is.

[wizzwizz4]

`` and '' is just unparsed markup.

[gerdesj]

So where do the top right to bottom left ticks come from? They are not on my keyboard.

Obviously I can trivially recreate any character with some effort but those left slanting ticks are not on many keyboards.

[rmccue]

The use of `` and '' comes from the typewriter days. You’ll see it particularly with professional authors who have been writing for print since then.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_accent#As_surrogate_of_a...

US QWERTY keyboards like the author is almost certainly using have the backtick above the Tab key, shared with ~, and it’s commonly used in programming.

[dylan604]

I blame Microsoft, as it was their software where I was first introduced to "smart" quotes using the extending characters/glyphs of fonts. I can also tell when importing someone's data that was copy/pasted from an Office type program with its auto"correcting" to smart typography.

[shakna]

The backtick? That's generally the non-shift character on the "tilde key", generally right under the escape key. It's on most physical keyboards.

[gerdesj]

Where do I find these things: “”

I use a en_GB keyboard and I have a very broad mind 8) I think I know where 66 and 99 come from.

[michaelmrose]

If you have an Apple keyboard it ought to be left of the letter z.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_and_American_keyboards

[8bitsrule]

Odd's bodkins