When I read /italic/ or \italic\, I end up mentally transforming the text so that the slashes are vertical lines. When you do that with forward slashes, you get text with a negative slope (the wrong way).

Demonstration: https://codepen.io/adrusi/full/poJXRgy

Huh. That's pretty damned interesting. Thanks for explaining!

Same question, not sure what your parents meant at all. Unless there are languages italicised that leans to the left ( That would be very interesting )