Typewriter Quotation Marks
"Ambidextrous" quotation marks were introduced on typewriters to reduce the number of keys on the keyboard, and were inherited by computer keyboards and character sets. Some computer systems designed in the past had character sets with proper opening and closing quotes. However, the ASCII character set, which has been used on a wide variety of computers since the 1960s, only contained straight single quote (U+0027 ' apostrophe) and double quote (U+0022 " quotation mark).
Many systems, like the personal computers of the 1980s and early '90s, actually drew these quotes like curved closing quotes on-screen and in printouts, so text would appear like this (approximately):
”Good morning, Dave”, said HAL.’Good morning, Dave’, said HAL.
These same systems often drew the grave accent (`, U+0060) as an open quote glyph (actually a high-reversed-9 glyph, to preserve some usability as a grave). This gives a proper appearance at the cost of semantic correctness. Nothing similar was available for the double quote, so many people resorted to using two single quotes for double quotes, which would look like the following:
‛‛Good morning, Dave’’, said HAL.‛Good morning, Dave’, said HAL.
The typesetting application TeX still uses this convention for input files. However, the appearance of these characters has varied greatly from font to font. On systems which provide straight quotes and grave accents like most do today (and as Unicode specifies) the result is poor as shown here:
``Good morning, Dave'', said HAL.`Good morning, Dave', said HAL.
The Unicode slanted/curved quotes described below are shown here for comparison:
“Good morning, Dave”, said HAL.‘Good morning, Dave’, said HAL.
Read more about this topic: Quotation Mark Glyphs
Famous quotes containing the words quotation marks, typewriter, quotation and/or marks:
“It is an old error of man to forget to put quotation marks where he borrows from a woman’s brain!”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“Oh demon within,
I am afraid and seldom put my hand up
to my mouth and stitch it up
covering you, smothering you
from the public voyeury eyes
of my typewriter keys.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“We are as much informed of a writer’s genius by what he selects as by what he originates. We read the quotation with his eyes, and find a new and fervent sense; as a passage from one of the poets, well recited, borrows new interest from the rendering. As the journals say, “the italics are ours.””
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean,—roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin,—his control
Stops with the shore;”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)