Yeah you're right and good point, and my earlier comment was partly misleading anyway, because there isn't much difference even among typographers between "apos

Yeah you're right and good point, and my earlier comment was partly misleading anyway, because there isn't much difference even among typographers between "apostrophe" and "right single quotation mark". A better way of stating it is to start with appearance: people who started with computers where 0x40 ` and 0x27 ' looked symmetric (like ‘ and ’) would likely end up using them as symmetric quotation marks (thus the conventions used in some software like Emacs and TeX), while everyone else, where they were not symmetric (looking slanted and vertical respectively) would likely not be led down that route. It's a bit unfortunate that there was this divergence, and that it wasn't settled early enough. An interesting example is The TeXbook itself: the 1979 TeX manual (in the "TeX and METAFONT" book), the precursor to The TeXbook and apparently written with mostly the SAIL environment in mind, simply says (early in Chapter 2): > In the first place, there are two kinds of quotation marks in books, but only one kind on the typewriter. Even on your computer terminal, which has more characters than an ordinary typewriter, you probably have only a non-oriented double quote mark (") because the standard “ascii” code for computers was not invented with book publishing in mind. However, your terminal probably does have two flavors of single-quote marks, namely ’ and ’, which you can get by typing ` and ´. The second of these is useful also as an apostrophe. While already in 1984, The TeXbook (second printing, October 1984: the earliest I have access to), written with more awareness of the rest of the world, has more-or-less the same text, but adds: > American keyboards usually contain a left-quote character that shows up as something like `, and an apostrophe or right-quote that looks like ' or ´. So already the appearance did differ across different systems. There's a bit more on another related page of Kuhn at https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/apostrophe.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/apostrophe.html (this one is about the opposite problem: Europeans using acute accent as apostrophe), and there's a bit more about history of these two ASCII positions at https://jkorpela.fi/latin1/ascii-hist.html https://jkorpela.fi/latin1/ascii-hist.html