Random pet peeve

[pne]

Random pet peeve: people who use ` (grave accent) as an apostrophe, as in "Joan`s dress". Or ´ (acute accent), which I've seen in German texts.

Comments

[sparkofcreation.livejournal.com]

I know a lot of people who have problems with that, mainly Americans living in other countries. It's because our apostrophe (') is in the same place that an acute accent is on international keyboards. (My keyboard, being US-International, will put an acute accent if followed by a vowel — s'i=sí — and an apostrophe if not — can't=can't.)

Drives me nuts, too. Don't know where the use of the grave accent for the apostrophe comes from.

Re:

[n-true.livejournal.com]

It's because they look a bit alike on the keyboard and no one ever told them which one is the right apostrophe. At least for Germans.

[jordik.livejournal.com]

I can understand it, as the accents (especially the acute) look more like the real apostrophe ’ than the ASCII tick '.

But it should not be used instead of it of course.

[noidd.livejournal.com]

Lemme guess. you're a LaTeX nazi?

LaTeX nazi

[pne.livejournal.com]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by that, but I don't think I'm one.

Though now you mention LaTeX, I also think it's ugly when people use ``something like this'' to mark quotation marks when they're using plain text. That may be the LaTeX way, and may look good in early X11 fonts, but looks strange to me in the fonts that I'm accustomed to. (Cue an article by Markus Kuhn (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html) on the matter, and another one specifically on the apostrophe (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/apostrophe.html).)

[asciident]

Total. Agreement.

I hate people who, for no good reason, use ` or `` instead of ' or ".