By John Gruber
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John Kelly, writing for The Washington Post:
The ad was for a Whopper Jr. promotion. The conceit was that you could get two of the baby burgers for a mere $5: one for you and one for a friend. But — spoiler alert! — you’d probably want to consume the pair yourself. Or, as the text on the screen put it:
JK YOU
ATE ‘EM
BOTHI grabbed my remote, rewound, paused and took a photo. This was the Zapruder film to me, even if the JK stood for “Just kidding,” not “John Kelly.”
This must not stand, or — to keep with the theme — it mustn’t stand.
This sort of mistake drives me nuts, and I spot such wrongly-curled apostrophes instantly. To me it’s as glaring a mistake as a misspelled word. So god bless Kelly for griping about it in a column in The Washington Post. (I’d argue that perhaps it’s correct for Burger King to use the wrong apostrophe, as a signifier of the care with which they prepare their food.)
But Kelly doesn’t mention the obvious explanation for how this happens: automatic smart quote algorithms that aren’t smart enough, in the hands of ignorant designers who don’t have an eye for typography. If you type:
'em' dashes and 'en' dashes
you want the apostrophe before em to be an opening single quote, the one shaped like a 6 in most typefaces. But if you type:
screw 'em
you want the apostrophe preceding the em to be a closing single quote, the one shaped like a 9. The various “smart quotes” algorithms you get while typing aren’t smart enough to make this contextual distinction — even very good ones — so you need to do it by hand. Here’s how to type them manually:
Mac | Windows | Linux | |
---|---|---|---|
Open single quote: ‘ | Option-] | Alt-0-1-4-5 | Use ASCII |
Close single quote: ’ | Shift-Option-] | Alt-0-1-4-6 | Use ASCII |
Open double quote: “ | Option-[ | Alt-0-1-4-7 | ✊🍆 |
Close double quote: ” | Shift-Option-[ | Alt-0-1-4-8 | Shift-✊🍆 |
★ Monday, 9 October 2023