gemini://tilde.club/~adou/gemlog/smart-quotes.gmi

I have recently read two articles by November, in which they justify their opinion that smart quotes (you know, the curvy quotation marks “ and ”) are a skeuomorphism, i.e. that their “design […] deliberately mimics an older element that’s no longer needed or in use”, when the straight quotation mark (") is the modern version of the same sign, but without the try to “imitate the slanted appearance of handwritten quotation mark” (if you read me, thank you November for I discovered this very pleasing concept in your article). November doesn’t speak about the apostrophe, but the debate is the same (’ against ').

I understand how the existence of two versions of the same sign could be infuriating. But my position is different: for me, straight quotes and smart quotes *are not* the same signs, but have different origins and uses, and the common custom to use straight quotes where smart quotes should be used is a “skeuomorphistic” custom. My goal here is not to convince you to use smart quotes, you are free and I’m against *too* prescriptive orthotypography (outside professional publishing), but to show that their continued use is justified by something else than mere aesthetic choices.

My first argument is that smart quotes aren’t an imitation of the handwritten quotation marks. Historically, the printing press was invented at least three centuries before the straight quotation marks. We could argue that smart quotation marks are imitation of printed quotation marks, but this argument could be used with any other letter. Straight quotation marks find their origin in the typewriter; the keyboard was very limited, and it was easier to design one with only one quotation mark, which could both mark the beginning and the end of a quotation.

Thus, to keep the straight quotes are in fact a way to *mimic an older element that’s no longer needed to use*, as computer keyboards don’t have the limitations of typewriter keyboards. If we consider “, ” and " to be different forms of the same character, the last being a survivance of passed needs, the straight quotes are, in fact, the true skeuomorphism. And an unpleasant one with that, for a very philosophical reason.

To illustrate this philosophical reason (which will be my second argument), I'll use the case of my mother tongue, French. French has the same problems than English, only bigger. In French, we use other quotation marks (« and ») which weren’t present on typewriter keyboards; moreover, whole letters were not writable, like œ or ç, and some capital letters were untypable: capital forms of totally absent letters, of course (like Œ or Ç) but also capital accentuated letters, like É, È, À, … In fact, with almost all typewriters, you couldn’t write correct French. And with a Windows default AZERTY, you still can’t nowadays (it’s better with Linux AZERTY, but still not perfect by default): you need automatic corrections from your word engine.

For a time, instead of trying to change the technology to adapt to human practices, they tried (and unfortunately in some places, like Switzerland, still try) to change human practices to keep technology unchanged with its limitations. For example if you want to edit a book in French in Switzerland, you have to remove all accentuated capital to put non-accentuated ones. But I deeply think that we should still use smart quotes because *it’s always to the technology to adapt to human practices, and never the contrary*. To use them is not only an aesthetic choice, it’s a philosophical one. I don’t want to see French disfigured because of ASCII rules, when UTF-8 exists and is easy to implement and use. It’s the same, if to a lesser extent, with the quotations mark of English.

But I do not believe that smart and straight quotes are anymore the same character. They were in the beginning, but since then we lived the digital revolution. And straight quotes gained a new role, and an important one: to mark the beginning and the end of strings. I’m no developer, but it seems to me to be a totally other role than to mark citations. HTML or Python aren’t English, and like I have no problem using straight quotes when I write in Esperanto (other than aesthetic), I only see advantages using them in code. But English is English. That’s why I say that the *use* of straight quotes in plain English is a skeuomorphism, not the straight quotes themselves, but that may be a little pedant.

Straight quotes are a skeuomorphism (RE: Smart quotes are a skeuomorphism)