It's an old print term, for the first sentence of an article. It's weirdly just an old English spelling of lead but whilst the general spelling evolved to lead, the technical term kept being spelled lede, because most old print typesetting pieces were made of lead (the metal) and keeping the spellings distinct minimised confusion in the newsrooms.
I thought it was an old print term as well (typesetting and moveable type is kind of a hobby of mine), but it terms out "lede" only goes back to the 1980s..
"Mind your ps and qs," "uppercase" and "lowercase" (which case the letters were physically stored in), "against the grain," "make a good impression," and a bunch of other common expressions DO go back centuries or more and come from typesetting and printing.
This isn't the stupidest thing you've said, but it might be the most ignorant and arrogant. You could have just looked it up, instead of arguing that your wrong way made more sense.
Is it? Lead makes more sense, information in criminal cases is informally known as a lead.
As this phrase refers to glossing over important facts, surely that's where it comes from?
It's an old print term, for the first sentence of an article. It's weirdly just an old English spelling of lead but whilst the general spelling evolved to lead, the technical term kept being spelled lede, because most old print typesetting pieces were made of lead (the metal) and keeping the spellings distinct minimised confusion in the newsrooms.
I thought it was an old print term as well (typesetting and moveable type is kind of a hobby of mine), but it terms out "lede" only goes back to the 1980s..
"Mind your ps and qs," "uppercase" and "lowercase" (which case the letters were physically stored in), "against the grain," "make a good impression," and a bunch of other common expressions DO go back centuries or more and come from typesetting and printing.
This isn't the stupidest thing you've said, but it might be the most ignorant and arrogant. You could have just looked it up, instead of arguing that your wrong way made more sense.