And I don’t see how one is any “softer” than the other.
People’s programming editors often do paren matching - does that make them smart parens? No they’re still just regular old parens.
Language is descriptive, and people do in fact call them smart quotes. That doesn't mean there has to be anything smart about them, and I'm not making the claim there is, I'm just using an agreed-upon term to convey what I'm talking about.
Cause it's shaped like a simple boat. Or sort of is. Kind of like how 'soft quotes' are considered soft because they aren't in a very hard like up and down position, and are instead positioned like a feather softly falling. (or so I guess)
Because historically, the insinuation was that cheap sausages contained dog meat, that’s why. Someone has answered your gravyboat question. And your ladybug example is bordering on blatant troll baiting.
> Language is descriptive, and people do in fact call them smart quotes. That doesn't mean there has to
Some “people” call them ATM machines even though the M stands for machine.
> I'm just using an agreed-upon term to convey what I'm talking about.
The agreed upon terms are Left Double Quotation Mark and Right Double Quotation Mark - nothing about smart quotes in the Unicode tables.
I get that the term smart is used colloquially - but your comment suggests that their Unicode names are “smart”. I do think it is overall silly and confusing to refer to the characters themselves based on some formatting or automatic insertion feature.
i.e. - the quotes are smart because they adapt to your region.