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In TeX, backticks are used for open quotes, and straight ones are used for close quotes. That's where I picked up the habit originally.

It looks much more natural in fixed-width fonts too, using quotes like that here kind of defeats the purpose.

Yes, I am TeX-damaged. A friend of mine even tends to use \"u for an umlaut.

Presumably it's the ASCII-man’s way of doing “curly” quotation marks.

English keyboards don't have the nice typographical up/down quote marks and using « » just looks strange... so we hack it with `quotes.'

Neither do German keyboards have the nice German quote marks. You can fake them like ,,this'' however.