why backtiks for a word?

[Julie Sullivan]

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 7:12 PM, mechanical amit
<mechanicalamit at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Jul 16, 2011 7:50 PM, "zeal" <zealcook at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi list,
>>
>> We often see that `a word what you like'. But i get confused on it.
>> Why is it `word' but not 'word' or what else?
> It might be a  carry over from the tex/latex world. In tex/latex a backtick
> ` is used to open a quote a forward tick ' is used to close it. Similarly a
> double backtick `` for opening double quotes and two forward ticks '' for
> closing double quotes. This way tex/latex is absolutely sure that you want
> opening or closing braces.
>
> Regards
> Amit
>>


Well done for deciphering the question, Amit! ;-)

Zeal, this isn't a kernelnewbies question so isn't really appropriate
for this mailing list, but having said that it is kind of difficult
googling for punctuation marks when you don't know what they are
called :-). So you might find this helpful; the punctuation mark ` is
also known as a backquote or a grave accent (as well as a backtick as
Amit pointed out) and here is a link to it on Wikipedia. There's some
info on its use in various programming contexts at the bottom of the
page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_accent

Cheers
Julie