the mellow tigger's musings

"Burying the lede." This idiom is one of my favorites, because the obscure spelling gives it an air of mystery. It really just means that the most significant statement is kept out of initial sentences for an important story. Since I'm talking about this idiom in particular, we'll pretend that today's post has nothing whatsoever to do with a certain topic that I promised to avoid for 6 months.

For example, suppose you were investigating potential side effects of a brand new kind of vaccine. Perfectly reasonable thing to do. New technologies might have unexpected consequences, right? Sure. So you work in your lab to answer that question. As you write up your findings (which are ONLY about the lab environment and NOT actual whole human people (yet)), you mention a few paragraphs in: "Oh, sure, we know the virus can add itself to human dna, so we were just curious if the more limited vaccine could do the same thing." As everyone already knows, of course.

Whoa.  Whopper of the decade.  Talk about burying your lede!

I'll gladly queue up for my next vaccine.  FAR better to gain exposure to the least influential bits, rather than both it and the nastier bits of the whole virus.  When this knowledge finally goes mainstream, I look forward to the next relevant Plague Poem on this topic.