Ticked Off
Apple is running another one of their two-part animated ads today on the New York Times website. It consists of a banner ad space running across the top of the page, synchronized with a skyscraper ad running down the right side. Our now-familiar friends “Mac” (Justin Long) and “PC” (John Hodgman) are discussing a quotation displayed in the banner space across the top.
“I’m just correcting this typo from the Wall Street Journal,” PC says as he climbs a stepladder. “Man, they do NOT proofread these things…Come on, that’s an embarrassing blunder.”
She Who Consumes Cupertino Kool-Aid Through An Intravenous Drip shouts, “Tell me about it! How did those stinkin’ tick marks get in there?”
Let me explain (before I hyperventilate). Many, many moons ago, I used to do freelance work for an ad agency that produced the materials Apple distributed to its own sales force during the year-end holiday sales campaigns. I can still remember art directors running around at 2am saying, “@$9*&@#$! Who left in the tick marks? Fix it, people, fix it NOW.”
There’s a clear distinction in typography between quotation marks, which curl inward at the bottoms and usually come to some form of circle or square at the top, and tick marks, which are simply vertical lines that narrow slightly from top to bottom. Double tick marks are used to denote things like inches of length, seconds of time, and double prime in mathematics. But they are not now, nor will they ever be, American quotation marks.
People have come to rely on software to convert their keystrokes from a standard keyboard into true quotation marks and apostrophes. Software designed for word processing or text-based activities generally defaults to some form of “smart quotes” or “curly quotes” so that people need not expend any effort to produce true punctuation. (In fact, WordPress will not permit me to conditionally override its quotation conversion hash, so Abe Lincoln’s height in English Standard looks like this: 6′4″.) But visually-based graphics and multimedia programs still require quotation marks and apostrophes to be entered by hand.
It used to be the case that Art Directors held the line against Tick Mark Creep in a sea of Illustrator, Photoshop, and Flash files. Clearly, this is no longer the case. I feel old now. And cranky, very cranky.
So, as a public service to all you young’ns, here is a quick and dirty keyboard combination guide for true apostrophes and quotation marks on a Macintosh keyboard (because we’re fairly confident that you’re not whipping up those Mac ads on a Windows box):
True right quotation mark ( ” ): Shift + Option + [
True left quotation mark ( “ ): Option + [
True apostrophe ( ’ ): Shift + Option + ]
True reverse apostrophe ( ‘ ): Option + ]
As for you, Apple Inc., I am very, very disappointed. Bad Apple, bad!
P.S. Would-be design professionals: If you can’t detect the difference between tick marks and true punctuation, I suggest you return to your soi-disant design schools and ask for a tuition refund. Clients, if designers hand you tick marks, please reciprocate by handing them their heads. On a plate. Side garnish of curly parsley optional.
– Update, 8pm Eastern –
It appears that some kind soul has attempted to ameliorate this issue.
Permit me, in my dotage, to repeat a rather ancient joke:
Q: What’s worse than biting into an apple and seeing something wriggly?
A: Biting into an apple and seeing half of something wriggly.
(Thank you, Mr. Hodgman, for your concern! I, too, worry for the hobos, to whom these obscure runes may represent a secret signal, redolent of fresh squid, the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, and Maureen Dowd. How very disappointed they will be.)
– Update, midnight Eastern –
For a while, they reverted back to all tick marks, but before the day was out, they got it: true quotation marks from end to end. I failed to get a screen grab of the final product before they took the entire ad down, but take heart — if the previous two-paned Apple pitch was any indication, you’ll be seeing this ad again soon at a website near you.
[…] Thousand Times No (Use of tick marks vs. quotation marks)%0A%0ASphere: Related Content%0A’; View the entire comment thread. « News Flash! Google Isn’tPerfect […]
“No one cares. Really.
Get over it.”
-Me
Is your blog not full of tick marks? I mean, I can see that you can add quotation marks, because you do it in the example, but in the body of the text, it’s tick marks all the way.
I understand the frustration, especially when it comes to advertising. But if the issue is that people who know better should use better practices, then how come you haven’t made all of your ticks into proper punctuation?
Good question! Somewhere along the way I turned off the hash filter in WordPress, since it was screwing up my RSS feed. If anyone knows of a way to make curly quotes in your blog while retaining tick marks in the feed (a sad necessity since a number of feedreaders seem unable to process the extended ASCII set of characters), please do let me know.
It would appear they updated it, but then somehow the second one turns back into ticks part of the way through the ad. What the heck?
I did not know there was a difference. Thanks for the lesson.
However, those “true” apostrophe and quotation marks, while fine and dandy for design purposes (including the object of complaint), are a real pain in the butt. Having discrete characters for the start and end of a quote makes parsing text more difficult, and using extended ASCII characters hampers portability. I know we live in an age of unicode and (wannabe) layout standards, but give me tick marks any day.
I thought they were called “primes”, not “tick marks”.
Since I learned about this (from the A List Apart article dealing with using these characters on the web: http://alistapart.com/articles/emen/), I’ve been mystified as to why keyboards got given the prime characters instead of quotation mark characters.
Paul, there is indeed an explanation as to why computer keyboards got given the prime characters instead of quotation mark characters… and if I’m not mistaken, it has to do with… Microsoft. Something about the way the first keyboard layouts were designed… At least, that is what I once read, but I can’t find any evidence online…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark_glyphs
Bad Chiat. Bad. Bad. Bad. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.
Even worse are proper quote marks used in place of inch marks. I see this in magazines and on the side of delivery trucks all the time. Yuck.
Even worse are air quotes (which some call scare quotes, yes?) used in place of real quotes. For example, as you are reading this I am sitting far away at my computer making a gesture with each hand beside my head, two fingers curled out, pumped up and down twice. This signifies (among other things) a sarcastic or ironic distance.
But can you see that gesture as you read this? No. Using “real quotes” when I type “valuable insights” is a far cry from the real thing. Sigh.
[…] January 24, 2008 Finally the ultimate typography geek online ad has been conceived. One of my bugbears is the wrong usage of quotation marks. This ad pokes fun at the fact that PCs use the default ASCII characters instead of the typographically right curly ones. Only a Mac uses the right ones by default. One of the many, many reasons why Macs are better than PCs (I am not usually a Mac vs PC person). […]
Using actual quotation marks (and actual apostrophes too) is simply correct use of the English language.
The use of primes or tick marks or inch marks is an accidental byproduct of the adaptation of the typewriter keyboard (no room for quotes until the high end model only IBM ball head machines in the 1960s) to the computer and then the computer becoming a typesetting machine. Typesetting always used and uses real quotes for quotes, etc.
Also, this poor typesetting is the big red flag (for the designer interviewing the person) that the design student (or anyone) interviewing for a job is ill trained. The lack of use of correct quotation marks and also hanging the quotes says - bad typographer. Since both of these traditional high quality features are now automatic or can be activated in Adobe InDesign, there really is no excuse for this mistake at all.
BTW: there is also the M dash N dash and other elements of typesetting that are often lost to this accident of history by non designers and ignorant designers.
Why care? Because when typesetting is done well, you don’t notice it and the reading is fast and easy. Just compare to horrid all capitals in small print on junk mail to a beautiful typeset book or even a well made web site.
[…] Re: WCML Time Keeping > He’s possibly a LaTeX user. Guilty. “…'’ does quotation marks properly in LaTeX, so for the past twenty-two years I’ve been using it in everything I type. It used to look better in plain text: in recent years the apostrophe character has changed from being an acute accent, as it was in older X fonts, to being vertical, as it is in most modern monospace fonts. The other give away of LaTeX users is using - when they want a hyphen (as in Beeching’s attempt to make the railways cost-effective), — when they want an en-dash (as in the failure of the modernisation plan, 1955–1962) and — when they — as they tend to — want an em- dash to set off a parenthetical clause or a slightly less formal alternative to a colon. Word and its ilk don’t do a bad job of “smart quotes'’ — they by and large will allow you to type "what he said" and typeset it correctly. They actually do a better of job distinguishing between single quotes (the closing character in `like this’) and apostrophes (don’t they?) than LaTeX typically does: they are different characters, even if they aren’t always different glyphs, and LaTeX users tend not to get that right. Word does a shockingly bad job of getting dashes right. ian http://www.1000timesno.net/?p=261 http://apostropheatrophy.com/ […]
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