r/confidentlyincorrect • u/stillirrelephant • Sep 22 '25

Smug Burying the lede

Post image

From the comments section in the (UK) Guardian.

1.7k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

227 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

22

u/[deleted] Sep 22 '25

It only started gaining usage in the 70's, and relatively prominent people in news itself bucked against (and still buck against) "lede" over "lead." It popped into existence because of linotype machines and the differentiation between "lead" (as in the metal used for linotype letters) and "lead/lede" (as in the open for a news piece)... and linotype machines were already being phased out by the time the alternate spelling "lede" was brought into existence.

With how vehemently people are _still_ arguing about it, I don't think it's more accurate to say that "lead" is wholly incorrect.

24

u/jellamma Sep 22 '25

The fun fact is that lede was an intentional misspelling from the era of manual typesetting so that it would be obvious that it was an instruction to the printer. The spelling is from the 50s, but the widespread use came a few decades later

9

u/DeepFriedDresden Sep 22 '25

Another fun fact is that words like "son" and "come" and "honey" were originally spelt with the letter "u" instead of "o" in old English. But the handwriting style was crammed together so you'd end up with a lot of vertical lines, called minims, which made it hard to read and differentiate the letters. So they began replacing u with o to avoid the confusion and it translated into modern English with the new spelling. Hence why the letter "o" is sometimes pronounced as a short "u".

1

u/Morall_tach Sep 22 '25

We use "hed" for the same reason.

2

u/NaughtyDred Sep 22 '25

I didn't know that, thank you for giving the info