chapotraphouse

My best guess is that they grew up in an era where they didn't have access to italics since they were using typerwriters, so if you wanted to show emphasis you had to do it some other way. Underlining was possible, but it's also a pain in the ass to backspace to the beginning of the phrase and spam the underscore key compared to just putting quote marks before and after.

Honestly, it's making me wonder about the origin of using * for the same purpose in computing contexts. I've been doing it for decades, but I just picked it up from other people and never really thought about how arbitrary it is. Maybe it's as simple as being similar to quotations marks/apostrophes (in that it's a small superscript punctuation mark) but without an established meaning when used in pairs? The only other character on a standard US keyboard that fits that definition is ^, and asterisks look snazzier.