A young friend emailed me today and wrote "lead" when she meant "led"—that is, the past tense of the verb "to lead."
This is a very widespread error, and it's understandable. The metal lead is pronounced "led." The past tense of "to read" is "read," rhyming with "dead."
So when people write: "Yesterday I lead the way to the top of Mount Everest," they're really being quite logical—more logical than the English language.
Instead, illogically, we should write:
present tense lead/past tense led
present tense read/past tense read
North American journalists are very aware of this confusion, and they've created their own "misspelled" word for the beginning of a news story or article. They call it the "lede," which means the first couple of paragraphs that tell us what the story is about and interest us in reading more. If you "bury the lede," you've put the most important part of the story somewhere in the middle.
(And this reminds me that the British town of Reading is pronounced "Redding"!)
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