A few bits of follow up from my last post [on naming bits of a news story][lp]: On Twitter, [Parker Higgens speculates][ph] that a “dek” has to be part of the article’s header, whereas a “subhed” can be the name of headings used throughout an article. So thanks Parker, now I am even more confused about deks and subheds. Next, I realized that in my last post I never actually defined “lede” or “nut graf”. In the sample I gave, those happened to be the first and second paragraphs, but that was just to make the survey more simple. In general, I would define the “lede” as a catchy bit of text near the beginning of a story that invites reader curiosity for reading the rest of the story. A related phrase is [burying the lede](https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/bury-the-lede-versus-lead), which means to put a more interesting part of a story deeper in a less prominent position where it might be overlooked. The “nut graf,” on the other hand, is a paragraph that summarizes the story as a whole, so if readers just take away one thing from a story, it should be the “nut”. At the opposite end, many stories end with a “kicker”. This is a final twist or turn of phrase that wraps up the story. [The Onion](https://www.theonion.com/)—which always has pitch perfect parodies of news stories—usually ends with a good kicker. For example, today’s top story [Liberals Say Sanders’s Acceptance Of Rogan Endorsement Sends Dangerous Message He Trying To Win Election][o] ends, > Griffin added that it was even more disturbing that Sanders would attempt this during an election year. [o]: https://politics.theonion.com/liberals-say-sanders-s-acceptance-of-rogan-endorsement-1841208921 which perfectly sends up both the haplessness of the Democratic Party and the ongoing Presidential impeachment. The fact that “kicker” can mean either “punchy last part of a story” or “little label over top of a story” is a good reason to call the small text an “eyebrow” instead. In a chat message, [Joe Fox][jf] pointed out that a “flag,” which got a respectable four votes, actually > refers to the nameplate of the publication that goes at the top of the printed page (often referred to incorrectly as the masthead) and [Joe Germuska][jg] noted that the text is known as a “shoulder” in India. Finally, many people have [strong feelings](https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2019/lead-vs-lede-roy-peter-clark-has-the-definitive-answer-at-last/) ([very strong feelings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Lead_section/Archive_2)) about using the non-standard spelling of “hed,” “lede,” and so on. Personally, I am not very concerned about whether the standard spellings are used or specialized ones, but I have a slight preference for specialized spellings because it’s more fun to be quirky. Still, I don’t want to leave the false impression that the non-standard spellings have a long tradition dating back to the days of the Linotype and so on. Howard Owens [found that in](http://howardowens.com/lede-vs-lead/) > the dozens of old journalism books that I have examined — none of them — spell it “lede.” I can’t find the definitive first reference to “lede” but it doesn’t start appearing in journalism books until the 1980s. [Lisa Waananen Jones][lwj] found the same thing in her research. So, properly speaking, the small strips of metal used to add spacing to [lock up letterpress printing](https://www.letterpressthings.com/new-page-1) are “leads,” not “ledes.” In conclusion, if I had a kicker, it would go here or maybe at the top of the page in small text.
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[lp]: /post/2020/article-bits/ [ph]: https://twitter.com/xor/status/1212757454636892165 [jg]: https://www.medill.northwestern.edu/directory/staff/joe-germuska.html [jf]: https://twitter.com/joemfox [lwj]: https://lisawaananenjones.com/noted/2014/09/12/lead-vs-lede-and-tradition-vs-substance/