short take: lead--another meaning?

[Dan Goncharoff]

"To lead" never means "to win". You can be leading during the season,
but at the end of the season you either won or you didn't.

You can lead a statistical category at the end of a season, however,
unless leading a statistic wins something. For example, you can lead the
league in hitting, but then you win the batting crown...

DanG

On 5/29/2010 2:57 PM, Victor Steinbok wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society<ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Victor Steinbok<aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      short take: lead--another meaning?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> A 1997 addition to the OED has under Lead, v.1:
>
>
>> [III.] [13.]    c. trans. Sport. To be ahead of (another team or
>> player) in terms of points, goals, etc. Usu. const. by. Also transf.,
>> to exceed or outnumber by  a specified margin.
>> 1877 Spirit of Times 24 Nov. 449/2 At 800 yards the Massachusetts men
>> held steadily, Wemyss leading with 71, Jackson and Law 70. 1907 C. E.
>> MULFORD Bar-20 xi. 120 In this contest Hopalong Cassidy led his
>> nearest rival..by twenty cut-outs. 1946 Times 26 June 2/3 The Dutch
>> pair, after missing a set point when leading by six games to five,
>> finally secured the first set at 9-7. 1979 Amer. Speech LIV. 73 In
>> another study..will led shall in frequency of occurrence by only 59
>> percent to 41 percent. 1989 Daily Tel. 6 July 35 (heading) Northants,
>> with seven wickets standing, lead Kent by 90 runs.
>>
> Note, in particular, that this one says "to be ahead". This is not very
> different from 13.b., except that it allows for a variation "to be ahead
> by X".
>
> Now, what does one do when (s)he (it, if team, I suppose) finishes ahead
> of the rest of the table at the end of the season? Maybe I am splitting
> hairs here, but, it seems to me, the verb has evolved into "to win" or,
> if no actual winning is involved, to finish ahead of others.
>
> http://bit.ly/9jMkSp
>
>> Gomez, who entered camp after becoming the first American player to
>> *lead* a foreign league in scoring when he scored 10 goals for Puebla
>> in Mexico, recorded his first goal for the full team against the Czechs.
>>
> It's not that Gomez was /ahead/ of other players in scoring some time
> during the season--he /finished/ the season as the top scorer in the
> league. This particular variation does not strike me as unusual.
>
>       VS-)
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