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.