Interpunct (middle dot) in R

What is the meaning of an interpunct (middle dot, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpunct) in R?

After some troubleshooting with column names that were thought to be identical across dataframes but threw errors that they were not, I realized that they look identical in Excel and printed on the R Studio console, but when copy-pasted from R console into the R code window, some of them “aquire” a leading interpunct (see screenshot: red is from R Studio itself, yellow is added by me to highlight corresponding parts in the console and scrip area).

Seems that this interpunct stems from Excel for whatever reason (I received the Excel file for analysis, and when I delete and re-type the cell with the colname, it reads nicely w/o interpunt to R), but R Studio color-marks the interpuncts in red (like other syntactical elements such es brackets and keywords), suggesting that the interpunct may have a specific meaning in R/R Studio, albeit possibly appearing in error in this example.
I could not find a description of the meaning of the interpunt/middle point in R, but possibly because it is called otherwise?