[bentley]

That’s the Unicode way of doing things (which I heartily subscribe to), but in ASCII’s original conception what you describe as “abuse” was a feature. For instance, in RFC 20 which is dated 1969, 0x27 is named “Apostrophe (Closing Single Quotation Mark/Acute Accent)” and 0x60 is named “Grave Accent (Opening Single Quotation Mark)”. Additionally, double quote also served as a diaeresis, and comma as a cedilla.

Of course, your links are right: it makes no sense to overload these characters anymore now that we have character sets and software capable of providing typographic niceties. But it’s fun to know the history.