8.11.2006

WaPo ledes dog cancer story “a peculiar exception.”

Study Finds That a Type of Cancer in Dogs Is Contagious:
Scientists in England have gathered definitive evidence that a kind of cancer in dogs is contagious -- a peculiar exception to the age-old medical wisdom that you can't “catch” cancer.
Turning in a substantially less hysterical - and substantially more informative - performance than Forbes.

(And yeah, I know. Generally, I consider it an affectation and try to avoid it. But it's true newspaper people call lead paragraphs ledes because “lead,” in the newspaper world, means something else. And we all know how fussy they are about avoiding ambiguities. Don't we.)

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3 comments:

...e... said...

i never thought it was an affectation, i thought's thats what it was!

Ted Compton said...

well you're right. it is what it is. but I've always thought it something of an affectation to use it in a general context because most people unfamiliar with printing don't know what leading is (or ledding, as it's sometimes written) so "lead" is not ambiguous.

at least that's my, you know, affectation.

...e... said...

but "lead" is the verb; "lede" is the noun