Cameron Booth

Pop quiz for you: which of the above is typographically correct?

For starters, let me give you the context: what these numbers represent are the last two digits of the year 2012. We see this kind of shorthand all the time in advertising, because it gives bigger headlines.

New ’09 [insert car brand here] Models In Stock Now!

So, which is right?

Most of you will hopefully discard the first option immediately: a foot marker, or what I like to call a “rabbit’s ear”. It should only be used to indicate feet or minutes, never as punctuation. We used to see a lot of these in the days before “Smart  Quotes”, because a simple press of the “apostrophe key” on the keyboard would produce one of these. Typographer’s quotes had to be accessed manually, either by knowing the Alt-key code on a PC, or a ridiculous keyboard combination on a Mac.

Which leads me to the second option. This version is being seen more and more these days, and it’s almost entirely the fault of these so-called “Smart Quotes”. These work by interpreting your keystrokes and changing your “dumb quote” into a proper opening or closing quote mark as it sees fit. Unfortunately, it interprets “dumb quote” followed by any character other than a space as the signal to replace that dumb quote with an opening quote. Normally good enough, but not here, where it is completely, utterly wrong.

Why is it wrong? Let’s consider what that symbol before the numbers actually is. It represents the fact that two numbers – the “20″ in “2012″ – have been omitted. What do we use when we omit letters in words: when we shorten “should not” to “shouldn’t”, for example?

An apostrophe.

This symbol isn’t a foot marker or an opening typographical quote. It’s not even a closing typographical quote, even though it looks identical. It’s an apostrophe: the most misused, misplaced and misunderstood of punctuation marks. That’s why the third option is correct, and why we designers need to think about why punctuation is being used, and not just let the computer choose our punctuation for us.

What brought on this typographical rant, you might ask? Well, I saw this on Facebook the other day: somehow, Harley Davidson managed to use both of the incorrect versions in the space of two pages. Whoops!