from Hacker News

‘Lede’ vs. ‘Lead’ (2011)

by gruseom on 2/15/18, 8:57 PM with 72 comments

• by scandox on 2/15/18, 9:41 PM

  This is great news. One of the most frustrating things on Twitter is everybody pretending to be a hardbitten journo throwing this term around like they were on a deadline...or even had a job.

• by ender7 on 2/15/18, 10:14 PM

  Note that journalism has a more overloaded space than most when it comes to lead vs. lead, so I'm not surprised someone started using "lede" to mean specifically the one that sounds like LEED. "Leading", a common typographic term describing the space between lines, is pronounced the other way, like the element (and is in fact named for it).

• by Doctor_Fegg on 2/15/18, 11:08 PM

  Former (UK) magazine editor. I’ve never seen “lede” on any publication I’ve worked on. “Standfirst”, “intro”, sometimes “lead” (though that was more often used to describe the positioning of a story on a page). But never “lede”.

  It’s possible it was used in UK newspapers, but I doubt that: most newspaper jargon found its way to magazines eventually (subbing markup was the same, for example). I suspect it’s purely a modern US newspaper affectation.

• by simias on 2/16/18, 2:48 PM

  It reminds me of a pet peeve of mine: the way most modern english speakers pronounce "celtic" with a hard 'k' sound. I'm not a native english speaker so I always assumed the 'c' would be soft here, because even though as we all know english pronunciation can be a bit... random at times, pronouncing "ce" as "ke" seems very out of place. When I first heard it pronounced that way it surprised me.

  After looking more into it, it seems that it's a relatively recent shift in the language, quoting wikipedia:

  > The ⟨c⟩ in the words Celt and Celtic was traditionally soft but since the late 19th century the hard pronunciation has also been recognized in conscious imitation of the classical Latin pronunciation of Celtae[...]

  So it's just some late 19th century hipsters wanting to sound posh by randomly borrowing a foreign pronunciation rule. There's also the fact that in Gaelic the C is hard, but that's kind of adding insult to injury because "Celtic" is not a Celt word.

  It falls in the same category as people insisting that the plural of "virus" is "virii" or that you have two "octopi" (both plurals being technically wrong IIRC). Given that about 50% of english vocabulary comes from french I guess these people should start using french grammar everywhere to be consistent.

  Or should I say "Given that about 50% of vocabulaire anglais come from français I imagine that these folks should to start grammaire french everywhere for to be consistant"? Am I fancy enough yet?

• by JacobAldridge on 2/15/18, 10:49 PM

  I trained as a journalist in Australia in the late 90s/early 00s - although I went down the radio/tv route rather than print so had only limited exposure (and a few bylines in nothing of note) to the latter.

  I never saw it spelled anything other than "lead" or spelled it myself any other way. Seeing "lede" later in life made me question what else I may have wilfilly missed - glad to learn I wasn't a complete moron through that part of my life.

• by jccc on 2/16/18, 3:31 PM

  What in the world are you people talking about?

  Hed, dek, lede, graf, etc. were all used in drafts when I was on the morning daily newspaper in J School specifically because they'd get caught in spell check.

  Still used on occasion now by people in my very semi-journalism job because absolutely everyone knows what they mean and where those spellings come from.

• by klint on 2/15/18, 10:55 PM

  I've never heard the "hot lead' explanation or heard the word pronounced as "led." If I had to guess, I would guess that deliberate misspellings arose for the reason I find them useful: they get flagged by spellcheckers, reducing the risk that placeholder text will be published. I've wondered, though, whether the funny spellings predated word processors. Lede, graf, hed, etc. would standout to human copy editors and computer spellcheckers alike. A 1970s origin for "lede," if correct, would suggest it emerged alongside word processors.

• by CPLX on 2/15/18, 10:32 PM

  In professional settings jargon is useful because it eliminates ambiguity. That's what it's for.

  The words lede, hed, dek, and graf (the latter three being curiously absent from this article) have no other usage except in journalism, they mean exactly one thing, and there is absolutely no chance that they are words that appear in the actual story. They are spelled the way they are so you know what they are when you see them.

  When you're in a fast paced business of organizing words and getting them into public hands on very short deadlines, those are useful attributes.

  Things like this generally get adopted because they are useful, not because of some oddball nostalgia. Ockham's razor suggests that's what has happened here as well.

• by smnscu on 2/15/18, 9:31 PM

  Can I just say that one of the many features of Mac OS that I love is force click (or triple tap) a word to see its dictionary definition. Especially useful for a non-native English and German (yes, you can configure multiple dictionaries which is pretty cool) speaker.

  Example: for lede you get the concise definition, even what "bury the lede" means https://i.imgur.com/2jcKHkh.png

• by jwilk on 2/15/18, 10:23 PM

  Language Log post about "lede" and friends:

  http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004380.h...

• by fao_ on 2/15/18, 10:12 PM

  Interestingly enough Google Ngram shows high occurence of the word "lede" (with varying capitalization) in the 1800s with two peaks around 1815 and 1860, and then heavily declining usage.

  https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=lede&case_inse...

  EDIT: Graphing lede,lead shows that 'lead' has always been in the lead with respect to usage. However, expanding the corpus timeline shows almost competing usage in 1564!

  https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=lede%2Clead&ca...

• by InclinedPlane on 2/16/18, 2:35 AM

  I always use this little mnemonic to keep things straight:

  Lead rhymes with read, whereas lead rhymes with read.

• by SAI_Peregrinus on 2/15/18, 10:00 PM

  I prefer the spelling "lede" simply because it differentiates it from the element "lead" with symbol "Pb". Heteronyms are irritating and sometimes confusing. I'd be happy if the "lede" spelling expanded to cover the other meanings with that pronunciation.

• by ramshorns on 2/15/18, 10:17 PM

  I had never heard of “–30–”. Apparently it marks the end of a story.

  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E2%80%9330%E2%80%93

• by unixhero on 2/16/18, 8:31 AM

  Interestingly lede means to lead in Norwegian.

  I thought someone had some kind of semantic exploration going on about the origins of the word lead from it's beautiful origins of Norse Viking wisdom. But alas, I was mistaken.

• by peatmoss on 2/16/18, 4:50 AM

  As an undergraduate journalism major who never worked as a journalist, I also remember learning that “headline” was often shortened to “head,” but was spelled “hed.”

  At least according to one of my J-school profs who had come from industry. So, uh, take all that with a grain of salt, even though I believe it to probably be true.

• by rhapsodic on 2/15/18, 10:09 PM

  Referring to a paragraph as a "graf" goes back at least to the early 90s, I can attest.

  Edit: Wow, I must have a stocker who downvotes everything I post. This was downvoted within a minute of posting it. It's true, and relevant to the topic of the post.

• by zitterbewegung on 2/15/18, 9:38 PM

  I thought that lede had a different meatning from lead until now... I think it should be Lead.

• by nonfamous on 2/15/18, 10:05 PM

  I think there's a fair case to make that lede is a genuine neologism, though.

• by jrobn on 2/16/18, 2:58 AM

  Off-topic...

  But this reminded me of English’s:

  Lead, led Read, read? (Why not red?)

• by chasing on 2/15/18, 10:20 PM

  All language is made up. If someone prefers to use "lede" and it's not causing communication problems, then people should use it if they want.