In non-Unicode locales, the left-pointing grave accent is replaced by the closing quote.
I am very fond of my ` characters and hate the fact that stupid standards broke what was the obviously useful thing to do ... but have nothing substantive to add to the discussion. If the patch is accepted, I'll follow-up patching standards.texi. Shouldn't acceptance of the standards.texi change (by rms) come first? (I have no idea whether rms will accept the change.) karl