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)
“When the typewriter stops in a New York office everybody’s embarrassed; men start to quarrel or to make love to the stenographer or drop lighted cigarettes in the wastebasket.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“If any personal description of me is thought desirable, it may be said, I am, in height, six feet, four inches, nearly; lean in flesh, weighing, on an average, one hundred and eighty pounds; dark complexion, with course black hair, and grey eyes—no other marks or brands recollected.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)