https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-matters-podcast/episode-15-american-english
This week is all about spelling. Some attempts to reform it have succeeded. (You've probably noticed that words are spelled differently in the US than in British English.) Others have failed hilariously. (You'll see.) But we're burying the lede; our first topic is that word itself: 'lede.' How did it find its current form? Then, we'll discuss the godfather of American English himself, Noah Webster. (Yes, that's where we got half our name.)
Download the episode here.
(intro music – “Build Something Beautiful” by Tobias Voigt)
(teaser clips)
Emily Brewster: Noah Webster believed in spelling reform, and he was hugely influential in effecting spelling reform.
Neil Serven: People in history don't often get to assign spellings to words. People have tried this. Most of them fail. When they try to make a spelling more simplified, when they try to make it distinct from something else, it doesn't often happen. This is an example that did.
Emily Brewster: Coming up on Word Matters: burying the lede, and why British English and American English look so different. I'm Emily Brewster, and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media. On each episode, Merriam-Webster Webster Editors Neil Serven, Ammon Shea, Peter Sokolowski, and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
I'm not going to distract with expository information here. In other words, I'm not going to bury the lede. In fact, it's the lede that will be our topic of discussion. That's lede, L-E-D-E. And just how did it come to have that spelling? Here's Neil Serven with the term born in journalism and living in the mainstream.
Neil Serven: We've mentioned before the idioms can enter our language from really anywhere, any source, any kind of experience, any kind of familiar history, any kind of common experience that we know that can then be picked up in the language and establish itself as a familiar phrase. So, we have a phrase that we use when, say, for example... Emily, if I was telling you that I went shopping for new clothes last week, I got this great outfit that I'm going to wear at my new job. You would accuse me of doing something there, right? Because I had never told you before that I was getting a new job. That would be a big deal. Since I was talking about getting new clothes, you would say I was burying the lede.
Emily Brewster: Neil, why'd you bury the lede?
Neil Serven: Why did I bury the lede?
Emily Brewster: What's your new job?
Neil Serven: It's a big deal. I should have told my colleagues here that I was getting a new job. I'm not getting a new job. So, this idiom, bury the lede, comes from journalism. The lede is the introductory section of a news story. It's intended to entice the reader to read the full story. It has the gist of what the article is about. Not all the details, but enough that make you want to learn all the details later in the story. And so in journalism, to bury the lede is to take that important content and put it down in the story so that it's not the first thing the reader sees. The important aspect of the story is sort of hidden by these other more arcane details. And so it kind of makes sense that we use it in idiom, in general context. And journalists of course love to use it, particularly because they're used to using it literally in their own work. So we have an NPR article from 2016. Danny Hajek says, "We're not going to bury the lede here. Bob Ross' hair was actually straight." The A.V. Club has another example, "The big box office story of the weekend isn't exactly strange. So let's bury the lede for a second and start with some good news. Small movies are doing gangbusters business in limited release." That's a rare non-negative use of bury the lede. We often hear about bury the lede in the negative. "You shouldn't bury the lede, don't do that." It's because it's never really a good thing to do in journalism. The curious thing about lede is its spelling. It is spelled in many examples, not all of them, L-E-D-E. But it wasn't always this way. And the word itself derives from our verb lead, L-E-A-D. You would lead a story with the important information. And so it acquired this different alternative spelling, L-E-D-E. And the reason for this, it is believed... It was to create a distinction from the word lead.
Emily Brewster: Well, the ambiguity in L-E-A-D can be problematic.
Neil Serven: L-E-A-D can be read a lot of ways. It can be read as the verb "to lead." It can be read as the noun, the metal, lead, and to lead something, the lead of an article. If you start throwing around these words with all the same spelling, then it gets confusing. So, when we talk about burying the lede, we often see it spelled L-E-D-E, and it seems as though this spelling was deliberately created so as to be distinct from other uses of the verbal 'lead' and the noun 'lead'. And of course 'lead' itself was used in journalism a lot, because lead is used in the lines of Linotype machines. It comes up so much, or it did come up so much, in newsrooms and the news production process, that it was useful to have this alternate spelling.
Emily Brewster: Did they often bury that kind of lead?