Why the use of these open quotes?

May 12, 2004 1:52 PM

In a recent MeFi thread, caution live frogs asks:

what's up with the ``fake quotation marks" style of quoting something in online papers? why fake it when there are perfectly legitimate ?curly quotes? available?

I have often wondered why those awful open quotes are so ubiquitous (and why only the open quotes?); anyone know?
posted by languagehat to writing & language (19 comments total)

It might have something to do with the parsing of fields entered into databases. Double quotes hold power in a variety of programming languages and such.
posted by evilbeck at 1:56 PM on May 12, 2004

Well, in latex, as far as I know, that's a default way to enter curly quotes, like, ``Tomorrow I shall walk my dog''

That turns into “Tomorrow I shall walk my dog” when typeset, so it may be a tex holdover, but somehow, I doubt it.
posted by Gnatcho at 2:02 PM on May 12, 2004

Please note, languagehat, that the "curly" quotes you used don't actually show up as anything useful in all fonts. On my screen they're just question-mark characters. I'm betting you cut-and-paste from Word.

Note also that Gnatcho's do work. I anticipate he used the HTML entity codes for them.
posted by five fresh fish at 2:08 PM on May 12, 2004

Don't doubt yourself, Gnatcho, you're exactly right. It's just a carry-over from TeX-formatted docs. Why it's still cropping up in a Mercury News article I don't know - is TeX still used in modern newspaper editing?
posted by nicwolff at 2:12 PM on May 12, 2004

Please note, languagehat, that the "curly" quotes you used don't actually show up as anything useful in all fonts.

the fact that languagehat's fancy quotes got messed up isn't because of a font issue, it's an issue with metafilter's comment submitting system.

below is just a test, please ignore. :)

“test” “test”
posted by GeekAnimator at 2:59 PM on May 12, 2004

strange, I could've sworn that second 'test' should've had question marks around it
posted by GeekAnimator at 3:01 PM on May 12, 2004

Even if TeX isn't used in newspapers anymore, and I have no idea why it wouldn't be, whatever replaced it probably uses the same convention for compatibility reasons. They're obviously just shoveling the text to the Web with minimal processing.
posted by kindall at 3:02 PM on May 12, 2004

It's a holdover from the newspaper publishing systems spitting content into the online system. Some newspapers are running publishing software that is decades old, and forces stuff like the quotes mentioned here. Still, modern web CMSes should be able to search-and-replace the doubled up single quotes with a regular quote.
posted by mathowie at 3:15 PM on May 12, 2004

Even more "disturbing" are misused quotation marks.
posted by Wet Spot at 3:38 PM on May 12, 2004

Thanks for that link Wet Spot. Reminds me of the "fresh" fish I saw in a supermarket recently.
posted by nomis at 3:51 PM on May 12, 2004

Please note, languagehat, that the "curly" quotes you used don't actually show up as anything useful in all fonts.

Well, that's because I just copied-and-pasted from clf's comment, so the fancy quotes disappeared into the infamous MeFi preview black hole. I never remember to put them in again.

Thanks for the extremely enlightening explanations, everyone!
posted by languagehat at 4:00 PM on May 12, 2004

Stories from wire services (like the example cited here) are always formatted like this. Wire stories need to work with lost of different systems, so they're delivered in a lowest-common-denominator format. Web sites for newspapers tend to just dump the raw feed into a simple page template. You'll see the same quote style in any AP story on almost every news site.
posted by jjg at 4:10 PM on May 12, 2004

"Reminds me of the "fresh" fish I saw in a supermarket recently."

Eh?
posted by five fresh fish at 5:34 PM on May 12, 2004

Oh, I didn't doubt the mark-up, I just never thought of newspapers using anything similar to tex.
posted by Gnatcho at 5:35 PM on May 12, 2004

fff: Eh?

It's true. Just the one though.
posted by nomis at 8:01 PM on May 12, 2004

Silly me, for years I believed that the above-mentioned misuse of quotes was intentional and correct—that is, that The “Best” Pizza in Town! was intended to indicate that someone, somewhere, had refered to that pizza as the “best”. Then someone explained to me that they believe most usage of this type is misuse intended to indicate emphasis.

And, you know, this made the world less interesting to me. I enjoyed trying to imagine who was being quoted.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 8:10 PM on May 12, 2004

Some newspapers are running publishing software that is decades old.

That's the case on the print side of things where I work. Depending on what program the original article was written in, we sometimes have to go into Quark to manually fix the quote marks. On a tight deadline it just doesn't happen. But then we're running mac OS 8.x.
posted by croutonsupafreak at 11:10 PM on May 12, 2004

sometimes have to go into Quark

Hell, thanks to Word and Outlook and PCs in contributor-land and Macs with Xpress in office-land, I'm always fixing sodding quote marks. And apostrophes that come out as commas.

But, hell, TeX for newspapers? How?
posted by bonaldi at 12:08 PM on May 13, 2004

Silly me, for years I believed that the above-mentioned misuse of quotes was intentional and correct—that is, that The “Best” Pizza in Town! was intended to indicate that someone, somewhere, had refered to that pizza as the “best”. Then someone explained to me that they believe most usage of this type is misuse intended to indicate emphasis.

I always thought they were trying to avoid making a claim that could be challenged in court, like when products use the word "lite" to vaguely suggest something to do with lack of fat or sugar or carbs or calories. So when I see The "Best" Pizza in Town, I think "Oh, they don't have the guts to actually claim to be the best pizza, so they're using "alarm quotes."
posted by bingo at 12:20 PM on May 13, 2004