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All language is made up. If someone prefers to use "lede" and it's not causing communication problems, then people should use it if they want.



It is indeed made up but it's a lot easier to understand when it follows established rules.


One of the things that's definitely true (and might be important, or maybe just a coincidence) about English is that there isn't any agreed authority to "establish" rules. Plenty of folks would like to set themselves up in that role, but none have anything resembling a consensus. The situation is so bad that the last time spelling reform (a trivial matter for such an authority) was "successful" for English it split the language in two, and all subsequent attempts have failed utterly.

So, the best we have is the descriptivist rule: whatever it is people actually do, that's the rule. People actually write "lede" so, fine, it means what they say it means. Humpty Dumpty was right... at scale.

And that means that when people _change_ what they do, the rule changes and there's no authority to say otherwise.




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