Noah Webster believed in spelling reform and he was hugely influential in affecting spelling reform.
People in history don't often get to assign spellings to words.
People have tried this, most of them fail.
When they try to make a spelling more simplified,
when they try to make it distinct from something else, it doesn't often happen.
This is an example that did.
Coming up on Word Matters, burying the lead.
and why British English and American English look so different.
I'm Emily Brewster and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Neil Servin, Amon Shea,
Peter Sokolowski and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
I'm not going to distract with expository information here.
In other words, I'm not going to bury the lead.
In fact, It's the lead that will be our topic of discussion.
That's lead, L-E-D-E.
And just how did it come to have that spelling?
Here's Neil Servin with a term born in journalism and living in the mainstream.
We've mentioned before that idioms can enter our language from... really anywhere,
any source, any kind of experience, any kind of familiar history,
any kind of common experience that we know that can then be picked up in the language and established itself as a familiar phrase.