I saw what you did there. *g*

I did not give you free reign for this kind of behavior.

Mmm. Truffles.

That is *very* brave of you, given her location, tag and mood. :)

You get to live because Grendel icon.

I guess balling your eyes out is okay between consenting adults, but... NMK. And in fact, so thoroughly NMK that I'd rather not ever hear about its existence...

DO NOT WANT DO NOT WANT.

The one that's been bugging me lately is "pouring over" some bit of text. What are you pouring over it? Your coffee?

That one makes me batty, too.

I actually kind of like "mute point". It's a point which cannot speak. *laugh*

Yes, I believe this is so. I still don't have to like it.

I had to google it, never having come across it in the UK (either the concept or the term - I assumed it meant 'swinging the lead' but it seems to be solely US media-speak). Google sources give both spellings as 'correct' for US though. If you believe the internets...

Yes, well, 'lede' is a bit of essentially obsolete American journalist jargon. It means exactly the same thing as 'lead' (rhymes with greed) but was deliberately misspelled phonetically so as to be orthographically unambiguous for the sake of the typesetters, back when type was still set with lead (rhymes with dead) type. Since 'lede' is just a deliberate misspelling intended to serve a purpose which no longer exists, I don't personally see much point in fussing about the retention of the spelling.

Thank you ever so much for the link. When I am upset and disgrumbled with the world, I shall go there to have my mood lightened.

So you're in favor of burying the "lede" in favor of "burying the lead"?

Well, I've been led to like the "lede", since "lead" might lead you to think it was "lead" instead of "lead". As the printer was led to set the lede in the lead type, "lead" instead of "lede" could lead to trouble.

Well, after you read the lede, then you will have been led to read what you will have read.

The reason "lede" was spelled like that, though, was because there genuinely WERE problems Back In The Day. The editors would send notes down to the printers, and it made a real difference if you were talking about shifting the lead up, which would mean that the physical type was misaligned, or if you were talking about shifting the lede up, which would mean for the printers to make an on-the-fly edit to pull the topic sentence out more prominently.

Yes, at this point, it IS an archaic holdover piece of jargon. But it's one that I'm rather fond of.

I guess the question is, at this point, do you use "lede" because it genuinely can be confused with "lead", because "lead" is just plain overloaded already and you'd like to give the poor word a break, or because it's pretty cool?

In my opinion, they're all valid reasons. And, for me, it probably saves me a couple milliseconds to read "lede" rather than figuring out which meaning of "lead" is intended. But my impression was that genuine confusion was less of a problem now than it was Back In The Day of hot type.

On the gripping hand, I feel that "lede" is a specific enough, and important enough, concept to DESERVE its own word.

There may be some instances of not choosing 'lede' that are driven by unfamiliarity, but I think you'll find that there are plenty of people who are familiar with that spelling and choose to avoid it for considered reasons. Avoiding unnecessary proliferation of jargon, for example.

Do you still write "Add 1" for your SECOND page of copy? Or write (30) or ### at the end of the manuscript?

Right, I know fiction ms. conventions are different.

I was just being snarky bringing up other archiac journalism practices that are essentially as dead as "lede" for "lead."

Old newspaper copy conventions called for a slug line on the first page of copy and "Add 1" on the second page of copy, followed by "Add 2", etc, for the next pages. The end of the copy was marked with (30) or ###. (I can't remember if 30 or ### was developed first).

*claws at eyes*