Lev Grossman! You Stole My Lede.
There is nothing new under the sun, and I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty certain I'm the guy who invented the exclamation-point lede (EPL). It started with a piecelet Jule Banville and I wrote about coffee tables for oddly shaped rooms for last year's best-of issue; not totally thrilled with this foray into service journalism I wrote a lede I was sure would get killed by someone smarter than me. But then everyone here liked the EPL! And started to use it! And then we mostly got over the (rather poor) joke.
And today, I was reading Time, and I see Lev Grossman is using the EPL:
Humans! They do like their words. Studies–by scientists who stuck recording devices on them and then counted–suggest that they speak some 16,000 words a day.
It's a good review. And now I wonder whether I invented anything at all–I can't imagine Grossman's scouring our blog archives for narrative devices. Did I tap into an ambient meme? I'm totally gonna have to change a line on my résumé if I'm wrong about this.
2:33 pm
Get over yourself. (Or should I say: Get over yourself!) Do an archives search of the WP Style section and you'll discover they were using exclamation point ledes before you were born. And even at that, Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe or somebody else probably beat them to it.
2:36 pm
I couldn't figure out how to search for it--any ideas?
3:06 pm
AB:
i invented plagiarism™ before you were born!(believe me now?)
so i think you or Lev owes me some royalties!
4:19 pm
I have to chime in here to say that it's not enough for the lede to involve an exclamation point. Before the exclamation point is one word and one word only; after, a sentence qualifying that word, often with an over-generalized statement.
4:20 pm
Accordingly, it would be more appropriate for this post to be headlined, "Ledes! Grossman steals them," or similar.
6:23 pm
Using the EPL makes you sound like John McLaughlin, which is to say, it makes you sound awesome.