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anamexis10/01/20243 repliesview on HN

FYI it's "bury the lede," a lede being the introductory section of a news story.


Replies

Maxatar10/01/2024

The word "lede" was introduced in the 1970s as an alternative spelling for the word "lead" to resolve ambiguity between the leading paragraph of an article and the metal "lead" which was used in typesetting. It didn't even become popular until the 1980s.

In fact, prior to the 1980s, it was indeed spelled "bury the lead". Here for example is an excerpt from a book about newswriting from the 1970s which uses "lead" as the spelling:

https://books.google.ca/books?id=3IxbAAAAMAAJ&q=%22bury+the+...

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sharkjacobs10/01/2024

I would argue that there's no reason to continue misspelling "lead" as "lede" outside of a context where you are worried about conflating the "lead" paragraph with the "lead" piece of metal which was used as a spacer between words in a Linotype machine

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lmm10/02/2024

That's a pretentious, anachronistic affectation - the phrase predates the use of "lede".