In professional settings jargon is useful because it eliminates ambiguity. That's what it's for. The words lede, hed, dek, and graf (the latter three being cur

In professional settings jargon is useful because it eliminates ambiguity. That's what it's for. The words lede, hed, dek, and graf (the latter three being curiously absent from this article) have no other usage except in journalism, they mean exactly one thing, and there is absolutely no chance that they are words that appear in the actual story. They are spelled the way they are so you know what they are when you see them. When you're in a fast paced business of organizing words and getting them into public hands on very short deadlines, those are useful attributes. Things like this generally get adopted because they are useful, not because of some oddball nostalgia. Ockham's razor suggests that's what has happened here as well.