Your colleagues was careless with back quotes.  See
?'`'
for a discussion of non-syntactic names.  This next transcript shows how to
use the
back quote to create and then remove an object with a non-symantic name.



> ?which
> ?'`'
> `females[\"dp\"]` <- 123
> ls(pat="fe")
[1] "females[\"dp\"]"
> rm(`females[\"dp\"]`)
> ls(pat="fe")
character(0)
>

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