title: Why do plain-text technical articles often enclose terms within backticks and single quotes?
body: <p>I like to save local copies of useful text-heavy pages from the web so I can practice improving their appearance by modifying the markup to include CSS.</p>
  
  <p>I've noticed that some text on the pages is often delimited by ` and '.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a good reason for this? I'd like to do my modifications automatically with a script if I thought these quotes were there for a good reason. Is it, for example, a byproduct of a particular authoring tool?</p>
  
  <p>I have tried to search for this, but search engines treat it like empty or incomplete strings and don't give meaningful results.</p>
  
  <p>A single quote example (` ') can be found in Eric Raymond's <a href="http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Cathedral and the Bazaar</a>:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>The problem was this: suppose someone named `joe' on locke sent me mail. If I fetched the mail to snark and then tried to reply to it, my mailer would cheerfully try to ship it to a nonexistent `joe' on snark. Hand-editing reply addresses to tack on `@ccil.org' quickly got to be a serious pain.</p>
  </blockquote>