The traditional French double quotation marks, « and », are called guillemets. They are used in the scripts of many modern languages, including some forms of Chinese (as 《 and 》 in restricted contexts).
The standard LaTeX commands to produce them, however, are \guillemotleft and \guillemotright; substituting e for the o leads to a compiler error. It seems that a non-standard spelling of guillemet influence the choice of the LaTeX command.
My Petit Robert (vintage 1991) defines guillemot: “Oiseau palmipède voisin du pingouin, habitant les régions arctiques [Web-footed bird related to the penguin, inhabiting arctic regions].” Perhaps this is all a plot to plant Linux imagery in people’s LaTeX code.
