In his \"youth\"

[GoodTaste]

Can you figure out why slashes are used here with quotation marks? It seems pointless to me and should be removed.


===================
Gandolf in the Lord of the Rings:

Originally called Olórin, he was accounted as the wisest of the Maiar (with the possible exception of Melian). He was created by Ilúvatar before the Music of the Ainur, and was at the beginning of Time amongst the Ainur who entered into Eä. In his "youth", he became one of the Maiar who served Manwë, Varda, Irmo and Nienna named. He was associated with light and fire, much like his peer Varda.

Source: Gandalf | The One Wiki to Rule Them All | Fandom

PS. I'm glad to see that UsingEnglish editor has automatically removed the slashes from the context. Now they remain in the title of the thread.

 

[jutfrank]

There are no slashes in the text I see.

 

[GoodTaste]

It appears weirdly here:

 

[Skrej]

That's something with your computer or browser. It doesn't appear on mine.

 

[tzfujimino]

I can clearly see the slashes in the image posted in #3.

 

[Rover_KE]

I can clearly see the backslashes, too.

It's doubly curious as backslashes are not standard punctuation marks in English.

 

[PeterCW]

Looking at the original I see no problem while using Firefox 77.0.1 and there is nothing strange about the underlying text. I suspect that a stylesheet has been set that causes problems with interpreting the double quote character in some browsers.

If you prefer a non-technical explanation - it's a glitch.

 

[Tdol]

I can see them in the screenshot, but not in the original. It could be a browser display issue. They are wrong.

 

[emsr2d2]

His name's Gandalf, not Gandolf.