Thursday, December 27, 2007

Inside Baseball


If you're going to use newsroom lingo, do it right. Perhaps you can expand this short list of peeves:

  • Sidebar is a word. Mainbar is not.
  • Lede, yes. Hede, no. The deliberately misspelled short form of headline is hed.
  • 8 comments:

    Nick said...

    The masthead is _inside_ the paper, not on the front of it.

    Philip Gray-Long said...

    A misuse Bill wrote about last year rears its head in the newsroom: "Can you take a look at this blog I want to post?" If it's being posted, it's a post.

    Then again, we should just be glad that a blog post is being read before it goes online.

    Linda said...

    Oh, thank you for saying this about "hede." I thought it was a typo when the editor of my old paper used to write that ... then he did it all the time, but I thought it was just him ... then I saw other people do it, so I thought maybe I was just stupid, newspaper poser that I am.

    Dr. Zoom said...

    Can I expose my ignorance and ask why we need deliberately misspelled forms of "head" and "lead," anyway? I've known of their existence forever, but I've never heard their origin.

    Bill said...

    As the story goes, when copy was submitted to Linotype operators on copy paper, there was a system in place to deliberately misspell typesetting directions to differentiate them from actual words to be typed in.

    "Lead" is deliberately misspelled two ways -- there's "lede" as in the lead paragraph of a story and "led" for "leading" (ledding), as in sticking strips of lead between lines to make a leg of type longer.

    Dr. Zoom said...

    Aha! Thanks, Bill

    Qwerty said...

    Then there are "graf" and "graph"...

    Jeff said...

    The main story on a page is a 'lead' not lede, which was already defined.