On Language; (HED) Folo My Lede (UNHED)
BY WILLIAM SAFIRE
Published: November 18, 1990
"IN THE OLD DAYS," wrote Herb Caen, the San Francisco columnist, "we pounded out the copy with two fingers and hollered 'Boy!' to rush this hot stuff to the composing room. Today you yell 'Boy!' and a girl arrives along with a member of the union grievance committee."
Waxing nostalgic (S. J. Perelman used to wax a fellow named Roth), Mr. Caen reminisced: "Gone the 'Boy!' of yesterday . . . gone with the demon rewrite man with the phone cradled to ear and cigarette burning his lips as he pounds out a perfect, tight, non-editable 'new lede ' (never ' lead ') on a fast-breaking story."
Why the spelling lede , never lead ? The flecked beige copy paper and thick pencils are no longer to be found in the newly quiet newspaper offices where typewriters have been banished, and "pounding" the sensually ergonomic keyboard is as frowned on as smoking. The last time I wrote -30- to mark the end of a story, a copyindividual at the other end of the modem wanted to know, "You don't trust anybody under 30, or what?"
To remind me of the era of slug-it-slay, I keep a "turtle" in my surge-protected office. (Wouldn't mind a little surge now and then, but the technicians roll their eyes and say that is not meant to be.) The turtle is a heavy table, I think made of lead, on wheels; the valuable industrial artifact came from the composing room when that place was converted from hot lead to cool electronics. Each turtle held a page of type; mine contains the prepared obituary of Fidel Castro, who outlived the preparations for the coverage of his demise.
Note the use twice in the previous paragraph of the word lead , which you internally pronounced as if spelled "led," to rhyme with "bread." Of course, if the context were not metallic, but having to do with vanguards as in "new lead ," you would have pronounced it with a long e , to rhyme with "new breed." You are blindingly quick and remarkably accurate at noting context and then pronouncing the word one way or the other; your pronunciation synapse works at 25 megahertz (a measurement of computer speed or multitudinous car rentals).
But you wonder: why do I have to tax my brain to make this fast led-lead decision? Wouldn't it be easier if the noun for the metal were spelled the way it sounded ( led , to rhyme with dead ) and the noun for the beginning of a newspaper story were spelled the way it is pronounced ( lede , or leed , to rhyme with deed )?
Led by the old hands of print journalism, a change toward simplified spelling is taking place. "Enclosed are two clippings using the word ledes to mean the introductory part of a news item," writes Janet Kiersted of Houston. One is from a column by Molly Ivins in The Houston Post: "Austin is abuzz (I love ledes like this: 'Washington is agog,' 'Paris is delighted'). . . ." The other is by Dave Shiflett of The Rocky Mountain News: "Horace Greeley . . . launched articles with armor-piercing ledes ."
You will not find this spelling in dictionaries; it is still an insiders' variant, steadily growing in frequency of use. But unlike telegraphese ( downhold expenses, instick earward ), tightness of space is not the impetus: lede is no shorter than lead . What's behind its use?
"I've always heard that lede was a deliberate misspelling," says Carl Stepp, associate professor of journalism at the University of Maryland. "The wire-service formula reduced chances that a label of a story would appear in print. Nulede was used for 'new lead' because such obvious errors would stand out to the eye; the label could then be removed before the copy hit print."
Lede , as we shall spell it henceforth, was defined as "a noun to refer to the initial summary of the story, or as a verb to instruct the printer what to put first" by Dorothy Colburn, a Nebraska English teacher, in the February 1927 issue of American Speech, though she held to the standard spelling. The use of the old verb as a noun was daring: Samuel Johnson stigmatized its use in this new way, in the sense of "first place," as "a low despicable word." (Can you imagine what he'd think of the modern harmless drudges who call his early dictionary "a good read ?" Perhaps rede would improve that vogue word; on second thought, I reckon not.)
As a variant, the spelling lede for lead dates to the 14th century; same with hed for head , and in the identical pattern, (HED) is now used as a journalistic shortening of "headline," and (UNHED) for "end of headline."
Will lede break out of its insider status and find its way into general use? Halfway down an A.P. story, far from the lede , is this recent usage in Canada: "Scott Schneider scored a pair of goals to help lede the Moncton Hawks to a 5-3 win over the Fredericton Canadiens. . . ." In a 1984 New York Times article about a Mafia figure: "he provided important new ledes and evidence."
To suggest this is becoming standard would be misledeing (that doesn't work; you would have to drop the e before the ing , and that would change the pronunciation of the e before the d ; stick with misleading ). But it has earned its place as a variant spelling, soon to overtake the original spelling for the beginning of a news article. That's lexicographic news, but I have learned never to put the story in the lede. Uncertain Tocsin
"I'M NOT TRYING TO sound the tocsin of war," said President Bush at a news conference called to balance what some felt was a bellicose note in his previous day's "I've had it." (Slang uists differ on the origin of "had it"; some say it's a clip of "I have had it up to here"; others think the "up to here" is an intensifier that came later; the origin is probably from "I have had enough.")
One reporter called me to ask, "What do toxins sound like?"; another called from the President's traveling entourage to ask if tocsins were like trumpets, and could sound uncertain. One reporter heard "dachshunds of war" and wondered if this could be an allusion to "let slip the dogs of war."
A toxin is a Greek word for "poison," especially the poison in which the tips of arrows were dipped by unscrupulous archers.
A tocsin is from the Old French Provencal tocasenh , "to touch (or strike) a bell," a bell rung to sound an alarm; hence, a signal of warning. The poet Longfellow liked the word, and the poet Byron used it in a gentle way in "Don Juan": "That all-softening, overpowering knell, the tocsin of the soul -- the dinner bell."
Words that are pronounced the same but are spelled differently are called homophones , a specific form of homonym that especially pleases punsters.
Toxin-tocsin has led to confusion before. I recall an evening in 1969, in Henry Kissinger's kitchen, when a call came in on an unsecured line from Secretary of Defense Mel Laird. "Yes, I understand," Henry, then national security adviser, said, and then began talking cryptically about the destruction of certain toxins. The answering message sounded confused; Henry's brow furrowed more than usual. The conversation led nowhere, both men wondering what was wrong with the other's comprehension of important issues.
Next day, they discovered that Mel was trying to talk about a secret project named Operation Tocsin. Lesson: never use a code word with an unlisted homophone.