Check it out:
Those leading single quotation marks are backwards. Crazy talk!
2 Answers
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 :) Jan 23, 2012 at 22:05
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:
Ordinary double quotes are still converted into smart quotes, but in the correct manner:
answered Aug 21, 2016 at 1:08
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1Wow. I've not only answered a bug report from a CM, but I've also changed a status-bydesign from Jeff Atwood to status-completed! I feel really grown-up now :-P– Rand al'Thor ModAug 21, 2016 at 1:10
"into“or”, and'into‘or’. Using “these” or ‘these’ quotes is normal English typography; "these" or 'these' quotes are typewriter-era approximations.