I was phoned by a confused programmer on Friday (and one of our more literate ones) who asked me the question "Why do we call them 'single quotes' rather than 'apostrophe'?"

Apart from the fact that it's easier to spell and say, I had no answer for her. She was looking for a cat to kick because she'd just been pinged by a client for using "single quote" when she was getting him to type in a command line at the DOS prompt on his computer, a conversation which was being held over the phone. She found me.

Is this just an IT thing, or is the use of "single quote" becoming more prevalent as a substitute for apostrophe, is it used only to distinguish between the use of <"> and <'> in quotes, and do any of you have any idea when it first came to be used? I couldn't google a damned thing about it!


The idiot also known as Capfka ...