A Correction
In yesterday’s piece about sexy sea cows, autocorrect decided a word I used was defective and autocorrected it - twice. A bit of explanation is in order. In journalistic parlance, the lede (“leed”) means the sentence or paragraph that begins a story. It’s the grabber, the thing that holds the reader’s attention and makes him or her stay with you. The common expression “to bury the lede”, ie, means to put the grabber far down in the story, diminishing its effect. Though it’s a relatively new word, from the 1960s, it’s is used by newsrooms across America. In fact, no less an august enterprise than The New York Times has a regular page one feature called The Lede. Here’s what went wrong in my story.