MWM Seeking SCQ (single closed quote).

When you work in the editorial game, as they used to say back when "game" was used as a breezy word for "business," certain things irk you. A colleague of mine used to get so frustrated by errors in signage around town (like a pizzeria that promised "Its The Best" and offered "Hero's," for example) that she would have nightmares. Once she dreamed she was on a subway platform trying to correct textual errors on a scrolling message board. She had to leave the city eventually.

As you may know, I get irked too. So many awful errors. And "aw" leads me to one of them. I think autocorrect may be to blame for this, because I didn't used to see it around, but now it's everywhere: people expressing sentiment with "Awe" when they mean "Aw" (or, if the kitten is really cute, "Awwwww"). "Awe" is wonder and amazement. "Aw" is "Isn't that SWEET!" "Awwwe" is nothing at all.

And yet that is not my main complaint today. The thing is, most people who are communication professionals know that this and many other common mistakes are mistakes, and that's great. Someone was paying attention in class. And yet they make this fisticuffs-provoking error of punctuation without a thought:

From Levi's, once a manly man's company but no longer.

From Arby's, still pretty manly.

You see it there, right? Yes, of course -- the single open quote (a.k.a. single left quotation mark) when a single closed quote (or single right quote) is needed.

IT MAKES ME SO CRAZY THAT I REACH FOR THE CAPS.

Here's what the Chicago Manual of Style's 17th edition has to say about this:

Owing to the limitations of conventional keyboards and many software programs, the apostrophe continues to be one of the most abused marks in punctuation. There are two common pitfalls: using the "default" unidirectional mark ('), on the one hand, and using the left single quotation mark, on the other. The latter usage in particular should always be construed as an error. Some software programs automatically turn a typed apostrophe into a left single quotation mark; authors and editors need to be vigilant in overriding such automation to produce the correct mark.... (section 6.117)

The examples they give below that (which I'm blowing up for visibility) are: ’90s (not ‘90s), get ’em (not get ‘em), and rock ’n’ roll (not rock ‘n’ roll).

As they point out, the apostrophe key on an old-time typewriter and on modern Internet software both render the apostrophe as a single hash mark, or prime. I had to jump through Blogger hoops to render the marks faithfully in the paragraph above. Too often a close or open quote, also called a directional or smart quote, were considered special characters, and would resolve online in weird ways if at all.

We've come a long way in the last 20 years on the special character problem -- and now we're going out there and picking the wrong special character. As CMoS says, when you write on Word, MS will helpfully curl that apostrophe the wrong way, as if you're a British person using a single quotation mark to mark dialogue or the like. But that is not what we want in the examples I've shown. We have to make the effort to fix it, because Word won't do it for us.

You may be a designer or an ad writer on a Web site for a pants place or burger joint, but millions may see your work, far more than will ever read most novels. You have to get it right.

(Fred can help for a reasonable fee, by the way. Remember my slogan: I'm not here to make you feel as if you're dumb, I'm here to make you look as if you're smart.)

Modern computing makes us lazy, the way self-driving cars probably will; we assume they will be right, and are caught napping when they're wrong. This is why people drive into lakes following GPS. The Internet can fill you with awe, but it mostly fills me with aw, as in Aw, damn it, they screwed up the single close quote again. Aw, shucks.