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Check it out:

more like dumb quotes amirite

Those leading single quotation marks are backwards. Crazy talk!

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  • 2
    This could be a font issue. I'll look into this.
    – Jin
    Dec 13, 2011 at 20:34
  • @Jin Font issues are awesome!
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Dec 13, 2011 at 20:49
  • 5
    I dislike smart quotes. Dec 13, 2011 at 20:55
  • 1
    Woo, extra attention for my question!
    – user1027
    Dec 13, 2011 at 20:56
  • 1
    @Jack I do too. But if we have to use them they should at least be correct.
    – hairboat
    Dec 13, 2011 at 21:01
  • What’s to dislike about smart quotes?
    – ghoppe
    Dec 13, 2011 at 23:38
  • @ghoppe they'd be fine if they were really smart, but so often the wrong one gets chosen.
    – hairboat
    Dec 13, 2011 at 23:57
  • 2
    @JackBNimble These aren't “smart quotes”: smart quotes are when an editor automatically converts " into or , and ' into or . Using “these” or ‘these’ quotes is normal English typography; "these" or 'these' quotes are typewriter-era approximations.
    – user56
    Dec 14, 2011 at 10:32

2 Answers 2

0

it's a font issue; you can verify by cutting and pasting the question title into a document with a different font, or even Notepad, etc.

Are droids a 'he/she' or an 'it'?

Are droids a 'he/she' or an 'it'?

Those single quotes ' aka ' renders in the font chosen for this site as the above image in the question. So by design unless you can convince Jin to change the font (which to be honest, I am not particularly fond of, but not enough that I want to fight about it).

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  • To demonstrate this, I edited the example question to use proper single quotation marks (i.e. ‘ and not '), and it renders correctly. So if you use the right character, you see the right characters :)
    – Tony Meyer
    Jan 23, 2012 at 22:05
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In the new new design, the font has been changed sufficiently that ordinary single quotes are no longer converted into smart quotes.

Since the quotes in the originally linked post have been edited to ‘these’ rather than 'these', I've had to choose a different post for a screenshot to demonstrate this:

single


Ordinary double quotes are still converted into smart quotes, but in the correct manner:

double

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