"Programmers use the grave accent symbol as a separate character (i.e., not combined with any letter) for a number of tasks. In this role, it is known as a backquote or backtick."
That was very illuminating, thanks. Interesting that the idea was there originally but was later deprecated when they realized video terminals couldn't do it. Today it would be trivial to convert the sequence letter/backspace/accent to its UTF-8 equivalent.
Heck, in some fonts ` even takes the form of ‛ or ‘. Which is probably where typing quotes like ``this'' comes from (which looks absolutely awful nowadays since it mixes an uncombined diacritic with a kludge of a punctuation character).
"Programmers use the grave accent symbol as a separate character (i.e., not combined with any letter) for a number of tasks. In this role, it is known as a backquote or backtick."