Cornered by Mike Baldwin for January 18, 2020

A tisket a tasket, a green & yellow “casket”.

From Merriam-Webster.com:

Spelling the word as lede helped copyeditors, typesetters, and others in the business distinguish it from its homograph lead (pronounced \led\ ), which also happened to refer to the thin strip of metal separating lines of type (as in a Linotype machine). Since both uses were likely to come up frequently in a newspaper office, there was a benefit to spelling the two words distinctly.

So why is there no rede? It would solve the read (reed)/read (red) problem. I think from now on I will REDE my GoComics comics! Come on, gang, who’s with me?!

Copy that!

I still don’t get it.

wow… I wish someone would explain this one for a dummy to understand (like me!!)

I know what a ‘lede’ is, but I’m not getting this one.

“…in the dirt.”

Traditionally, news stories begin with the most important points (including the lede), followed by less-important matters. That way, you could get the gist of the story from just the first few paragraphs. Also, editors could save space by cutting from the bottom without losing anything important. “Burying the lede” means putting important info further down where it might be missed or cut.

Here, since one lede (his decision to take a nap) is part of the punchline, she delays it to the end—bad journalism, but good joke-telling. I suppose technically she should have said, “He died while taking a short nap when he didn’t feel well after lunch.” (I would actually break that into two shorter sentences.)

A bit to much specialized knowledge needed for this to be humorous.