Curiosity

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, was originally meant to have a cat (felis catus) on board. Initially, the idea was just a joke made by an anonymous board member, but no one seemed to get the irony. It was only when scientists told the administrator, Charles F. Bolden, Jr., that a cat would have “a Laika's chance in space” of surviving such a trip, that the idea was put to rest. A very fortunate turn of events for Mr. Snuggles, who had already been picked out.

The interesting part (and the reason it has relevance to typoguistics) is that these scientists were not in fact astronomers but linguists, and had based their findings on a common saying. “And even if this is not an exact science,” said one of the scientists “we can't risk it for the sake of NASA's reputation.”

Quotation mark

Quo·ta·tion marks [kʰwɔʊ̯ˈtʰɛɪ̯ʃən mɑːk] are a set of symbols surrounding a quote. Their shapes vary from language to language. First there are the inverted commas, which can be either single or double, and either dumb or smart.

‘Single’, “Double”; "Dumb", “Smart”

Dumb quotes look the same on either side, and this was the only way to do it with a typewriter. But smart quotes (or typographic quotes) look different, depending on whether they are opening (or beginning) the quote or closing (ending) it. And these different quotes also have language-specific forms. English, for example, uses 6-shaped opening quotes and 9-shaped closing quotes:

“English”

In German these are opposite and the opening quotes are low, resembling commas.

„Deutsch“

And then there is the Swedish way...

”Svenska”

Pretty dumb, if you ask this author. But wait it gets worse. Read on to see what Finnish does.