Iʼm very persnickety about this stuff, especially in my professional writing, and I agree with Ted. Iʼm now using 7 different kinds of apostrophe / quote in my writing, always trying ot make sure that the right one is used in the right place.
1. and 2. – Open and close double quotes – “Title of TV Show” or “somebody said something.” [Windows numeric keypad shortcut: Alt-0147, Alt-0148]
3. and 4. – Open and close single quotes – ‘Movie title’ or ‘air quotes.’ [Alt-0145, Alt-0146]
5. and 6. – feet/hours and inches/minutes – 5’4″ – Tom Cruiseʼs height or my attention span.
7. – Modifier letter apostrophe, which I canʼt do without, even in the previous clause. [HTML: ʼ]
Edit: While I still agree with Ted’s blog, Common user interfaces, browsers, and search engines make it impossible to implement without a lot of pain. For example, if you search for
Tedʼs
on Google, it sees that as one single word, no punctuation. Thus, youʼll only get about 844 results. Thatʼs good for Tedʼs Blog, which comes up as the #1 hit, even without putting the search term in quotes! But, who is going to search for that, especially when no key on the keyboard exists to type that character?
Search for
“Ted’s Blog”
and you won’t find Ted Clancy’s blog! You will, however, find over 21 000 other results for other Teds with blogs.
This has some interesting side-benefits. For example, I was using them for all movie titles and synopses at work, and it was very easy to spot who around the world was ripping off my content – they would all copy and paste the modifier letter apostrophe from my text, which could be found verbatim via Google.
For example:
“Hitmanʼs Wifeʼs Bodyguard”
and
“Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard”
are two completely different Google searches. In only 52 results, the former will return all of the English-language instances where the content was ripped straight from my website and social media posts, including by the competition!
In other languages, e.g. Japanese, this could just be that theyʼre not familiar with using apostrophes.
The latter, on the other hand, returns 562 000 results. And, you’ll get the same 562 000 results if you search for
“Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard”
which tells you that as far as Google is concerned, ’ and ‘ are the same thing.
Oh well, this all means that I’m forced to use a right single quote, as I’ve done in this sentence, instead of the “proper” modifier letter apostrophe, in future.
Sorry, Ted, I agree with you, but the wheel is in motion and it’s nigh impossible to stop the convention!