Ha! That's very interesting. I mean I never knew that people tried to claim that there was some long history about the word lede", but that's just how it was referred to in every journalism class I've taken and in the papers I worked at. I like using it because its distinct spelling makes it obviously different than all the other meanings of "lead", and journalism has all kinds of jargon anyway..."graf" (paragraph), "nutgraf" (summary paragraph of a story), "subhed" (sub heading inside a story), "refer" (pronounced "reefer", an item that references something somewhere else in the paper). And "TK", for "to come", which I still use when writing or coding because it's very easy to grep for.
Reading this made me want to look up `cq`, which is what you jotted into your story as meta-text, next to a weirdly-spelled name or just weird fact to indicate to whomever is going to edit your story, Yes, this thing has been double-checked even if it looks weird, so please don't change it to what you think it is -- an example might be "Katharine Weymouth `cq`", for the former publisher of the Washington Post, whose name is often spelled as "Katherine" mistakenly.
I've heard other journalists shrug and say they've heard that `cq` stands for "correct but queer". But apparently its likely origin is Latin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadit_quaestio
Maybe it evolved from that, but `cq` is distinctly different than `sic`. cq is used as a meta-tag in story editing systems (I have no idea what news writers did before computers) to communicate between editors. `sic` is used to communicate to the reader that that weird quote is what was actually said. I guess you could put "sic" in as meta-text that wouldn't get printed, but it still might be ambiguous as to the writer's/editor's intent.
