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Guest:The debate is can you use the phrase "lead by" or should it be "led by" for introducing a new leader in the present tense?
"Led" sounds correct, but in the dictionary "lead" is listed as the present tense and "led" as the past tense.
Anyway, the form 'led' is not only the past tense form but also the past participle of lead.
The past participle is used to form the passive voice, therefore you can use 'led' in the present tense passive:
"The group is led by xy."
Anonymous:yeah, "lead" in the context of using passive voice may sound "correct", but it' not more correct than saying "there IS many people", instead of "there ARE.." but, hey, [almost] everyone is doing that.. unfortunately..
Anonymous:A memo that came across my desk today says, in part: "The BB Team, lead and managed by Mr. C, is part of ..."
"Lead" should be "led", even in the present tense, because it is an abbreviated way of saying, "being led by ...". The unstated present tense of this verb phrase is "being."
Note that the other present tense verb here--"managed"--is correctly stated in the past tense. If the present tense of "lead" were appropriate, the present tense of any similar verb should also be used, so it would say, "The BB Team, lead and manage by Mr. C, is part of ...", which is (or seems to be) clearly wrong. Anyway, by substituting other words in place of "led," such as "managed," "guided," "supervised," etc., the past tense is clearly correct according to common usage and maybe we can get over this hang-up based on an overly-literal misapplication of the dictionary.
Anonymous:You have all helped me understand this subject much better. I'm glad I red what you had to say.
Pemmican'lead' is indeed present tense.
You correctly state that "lead" is the present tense. It would also be helpful to point out that when it is used in the present tense, it is pronounced "leed" as in "I am the Group Leader and I will lead the discussion."
The only time that the spelling "lead" is pronounced like "led" is when refers to a heavy metal used in plumbing and bullets. Improper use gets through spell checkers so often that it starts to appear correct.
Red is a colour. The word should be read. The pronunciation for both of these words is the same, but they have different meanings. The present and past tense for read are the same, but they are prononced differently.
Anonymous:I understand the difference between the words read (past tense of the verb read) and red (a colour). What I was trying to point out is that any argument promoting the logic for led just glosses over the silly irregularity of English spellings. Read (present tense) and read (past tense) provides a model that possibly explains why many mistakenly use lead (short e) as the past tense for lead (long e). I find that argument to be more convincing than the other argument given above, i.e. confusion between the word lead (the metal) and the word led due to their identical pronunciations.
It would make much more sense if all similarly spelled verbs followed the simple "-ed" suffix rule to obtain the past tense spelling.
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