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It’s “buried the lede”


Yes, but "lead" is not completely wrong either:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/bury-the-lede-...


While I acknowledge the authority of the domain for your link, I must say that I have come to truly despise this class of slimy homophone equivocations (I'm attacking the concept, not you). There is something valuable, I claim, when specialist jargon leaks into general use and begins to become adopted by the masses. We (the public) get to feel as if we are in on the process of a specialized craft.

There should be no shame for innocent ignorance, but the remedy is correction and improvement (lifting all boats), not passing out participation trophies by watering down our vocabulary. "Massachusetts" is hard to spell (I just looked it up, myself, to be certain), but that doesn't make it a good idea to accept alternates.


It's not homophone equivocation. "Lede" is obsolete, and for some reason people started using lede instead of lead. Lead has been in use for this for longer than lead.

> lede

> obs. variant of lead n. and v.

> lede

> variant of leed 1, Obs. language.

Earlier uses of "Lead":

> lead, n. 2

> f. Journalism. A summary or outline of a newspaper story; a guide to a story that needs further development or exploration; the first (often the most important) item in an issue, bulletin, etc. Cf. lead story, etc., under sense 11b below. Quot. 1947 refers to a radio news broadcast.

> 1927: Amer. Speech II. 241 “`Lead'..is used as a noun to refer to the initial summary of the story, or as a verb to instruct the printer what to put first.”

> 1947: Hansard, Commons 19 Dec. 2113 “There is what one calls the `lead', which is..the first item.”

Note that the Webster link says

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/bury-the-lede-...

> Our earliest examples of 'lede' come from the 1970s, around the time that Linotype machines began disappearing from newsrooms.




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