Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> The reason for its existence still holds.  Or is there some other
> mechanism which achieves the same thing?

I suggested the mechanism of setting the locale, which is needed anyway in an 
environment that can't display non-ASCII characters.  That is, curved quote 
characters would still be transformed to grave accent and apostrophe in the 
*Help* buffers, which I think was your main goal; it's just that the 
text-quoting-style variable wouldn't be needed.

Something like the attached change to the manual, say, with corresponding 
changes elsewhere.