HELP ME..Apostrope WOES!!

[SPECTER]

       I am having difficulty using the accent grave key. I want to use it 
to surround the UNIX date command in an echo statement, there by printing the
date instead of the word date. But the system keeps interpreting the accent
grave key as a control-D. Why??? AAHHH, this is stupid! This is a simple
UNIX command substitution what is wrong?!?!?! Please advise. I thought
perhaps my the keymapping from my terminal was off so I had it send an
ascii 27 when I hit the apostrophe (accent grave) key but when I did that
nothing showed up on the screen. As you can tell I am desperatly trying everything
                                    -Noah