Heh, thanks. I did just look up what people on StackExchange thought about it, and in short: both are correct, although the word originated as a mass noun (uncountable).
Thanks! I’ve used emails as a plural of email for a long time, referring to the messages. Not a native speaker, maybe it’s something Dutch people do with some loanwords. Never softwares or the (more recent) codes, though.
I guess it is a matter of how “fluent” you are in the language. With some foreign languages, e.g. when I started learning a bit of Japanese, I could recognize some kanji, understand some bastc sentences, but still had no idea what it would sound like. Maybe it’s similar to that. We get good at recognizing patterns and interpret them just enough to accomplish what we need, and if we haven’t had any use for “knowing exactly what it sounds like” (maybe just enough to recognize we are missing some notes while playing), we save the energy needed to learn more.
But a conductor would definitely need to know what it should sound like (or how they would want the orchestra to make it sound), so it is part of the interpretation of the pattern.
Same for lords patrician and other intra-audiophiles.
The opening quotation marks should be on the bottom, but it’s been a while since I wrote them that way. Luckily, the wiki page (in Dutch) shows how they can be entered in three common OSes (see: unicode), so I’ll try my best to revive the correct usage again.
Also, I don’t think it is considered incorrect to use top quotation marks on a computer any longer.