Having started using Perl back in 1996 and learning conventions for character escaping in like eight to twelve other languages since, I’m continually impressed by how escape characters vary by language. And in the case of PowerShell, the (`) character really pulls the majority of the weight in the language. PowerShell, coming from the Microsoft heritage of DOS where the path separator was sadly backslash (\), could never realistically adopt backslash as an escape character as the escape character. C:\\Hello\\ World.txt, right?

This SS64 page on PowerShell Escapes has a good rundown showing how complex string parsing is and what choices PowerShell made to optimize the language around using (`) as its escape character.