"bury the lede" And, Eventually, End The Story

[Doug_Harris]

Another term once commonly used by newspaperman (from the days
when few if any women worked as journalists or printers) is
-- 30 --, often written that way. There are assorted ideas of
how the term originated (see http://saila.com/journalism/thirty/).
The one I heard when I was new to that business (some 45+ years
ago) was that the term had something to do with the story was at
an end when the typesetter reached the -- 30 -- and he could then
take that long a lunch break. Had that in fact been the true meaning,
one would have expected to see nothing but over-fed typesetters who
got, took and made the most of _far_ too many lunch breaks.
dh

Arnold M. Zwicky responded to . . .

On Aug 25, 2008, at 7:25 AM, Larry Horn wrote:

> At 7:14 AM -0700 8/25/08, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>> On Aug 25, 2008, at 6:49 AM, Dave Wilton wrote:
>>
>>> "Lede" is a standard journalistic term and, indeed, it is so spelled
>>> to
>>> avoid confusion with the metal. Merriam-Webster has it from 1976.
>>> "Bury the
>>> lede/lead" is a common phrase among journos.
>>
>> related is journalistic "hed" for "head", that is a headline.
>>
>> arnold
>>
> --to forestall confusion with "heed" or "hayed"?  There's something
> odd here...

for a longer discussion, see:

   ML, 4/8/07: Hed, dek, lede, graf, tk: Live with it:
  http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004380.html

i was once told that the spelling "hed" for "head" 'headline' was to
distinguish this sense from other uses of "head", but that didn't
strike me as particularly plausible.  i suspect that the spellings are
mostly badges of the journalist's trade.

arnold

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