This askubuntu question identifies/locates the " ` " key on the keyboard, and discusses its use in window switching.
This question addresses the use of backticks for the shell.
However, why is the backtick used in combination with a single quote in man pages (e.g. in the 2nd or 3rd paragraph down in the fstab man page, `like such.'). Is it related to HTML formatting, similar to how backticks are used on this forum to format code examples?
The use of different symbols for opening and closing quote is just a common typographic style. See Wikipedia: Quotation mark - Electronic documents - Typewriters and early computers:
Typographically, there are two types of quotation marks:
'…' and "…", are known as neutral, vertical, straight, typewriter, or "dumb" quotation marks. The left and right marks are identical.
‘…’ and “…”, are known as typographic, curly, curved, or book quotes. The left (start) and right (end) forms are different, resemble small figures six and nine raised above the baseline (like 6…9 and 66…99), but then solid, i.e., with the counters filled. In many typefaces, the shapes are the same as those of an inverted (upside down) and normal comma.
The second ‘…’ typographic style is the one used in man pages.
A similar style is used for double quotes in Latex, except the ` and ' characters are repeated twice to signify the double quote:
``You were a little grave,'' said Alice.
