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Comment by 131hn | Hacker News Reader

I do not think this symbol is nor used (in addition with a letter), nor ever called anything but "backtick". it's not an "accent grave" (even if it might be used as it), but a revert appstrophe - backtick or backquote.

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The key marked ` is often set as a "dead key" on European keyboard layouts -- typically the layouts where the accent isn't commonly used, but will be needed for typing people and place names, or the occasional foreign word.

With a Danish Mac layout, to type ` I press it then press space. To type è, ì etc, I press `, then press the vowel. Similarly I can use the keys marked ¨ ^ and ´. (The Danish letters æ, ø, å have their own keys, since they are used very frequently.)

So, I would never call it "backtick", since it is a grave accent.

It pisses me off to no end when software uses keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+` or even just ~. These are simply unusable with my keyboard.

It pisses me off to no end when software uses keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+anything, unless it's using ASCII control characters (e.g. vi, emacs). Every *nix GUI toolkit knew this until the year-of-desktop-Linux crowd insisted on slavishly imitating every Windows mistake.

The 1967 version of ASCII (which introduced ` along with the other characters like lower case in the same columns) allowed certain characters [`'"~^,] to have a dual role as punctuation [‘’"‾^,] or accents [`´¨˜ˆ¸] — not as some fancy complicated encoding, but simply as type bars that would look OK when overstruck on a letter. The characters ^ ` and ~ were encoded specifically because they could be used as accents. Notwithstanding the name we know it under, ASCII was an international effort.

ASCII-1967 isn't online but EMCA-6-1973 is functionally equivalent. https://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ec...

It is a grave accent. Something which was and still largely is of little use to many that grew up in United States knowing only English. So, such users abused and re-purposed it as a "backtick", which feels like an unfortunate decay due to ignorance. But such things continually happen.

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