A clear and simple word, with many applications. A “leader” leads from the fishing line to the hook and offers opportunities for complicated knot-tying. The first chair of the first-violin section, in America the “concertmaster,” is in England “the leader” of the orchestra. In England also a “leader” is or used to be the main editorial of a newspaper, from the days when such editorials “led”—i.e., were the very first article on—the front page of the Times, printed in that newspaper’s distinctive type style (see Bourgeois). “Leader” is also a political term, of course, and in the twentieth century one with ominous undertones: der Führer and il Duce both mean “the leader.”
My favorite application of the word comes in astronomy. Historically, stars visible to the naked eye have been given names consisting of a Greek letter plus the constellation name in the genitive case, starting off with “alpha” for the most prominent star. Thus α Canis Majoris and α Boötis are the brightest stars in Canis Major and Boötes respectively. Prominent stars usually have given names, too; α Canis Majoris is Sirius, the Dog Star, the brightest in the whole sky,
while α Boötis is Arcturus, a yellow-orange giant which you can locate by following the curve of the Big Dipper’s handle outward (“arc to Arcturus”). Most stellar given names, unlike these two, come from Arabic—but that is another story. The point of interest here is that stars like Sirius and Arcturus are sometimes said to be the “leaders” of their constellations. This is a usage unknown to the OED and to the many glossaries of astronomical terms which I have consulted, but it appears in stargazing literature. I like it because it faithfully reproduces the actual experience of looking up into the darkening sky at twilight. First to become visible, of course, are the brightest stars, and they seem to lead the other stars in the constellations into place.
No one has written about this phenomenon more movingly than Coleridge, in one of the mysteriously beautiful prose glosses which he added to “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”:
In his loneliness and fixedness [the Ancient Mariner] yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.
The Ancient Mariner’s shipmates have all died, cursing him, with their ship remaining becalmed in the wide Pacific. Now, as the gloss indicates, his heart begins to open to the natural world around him and his prolonged healing process starts. Of course the gloss is part of the whole magical world which Coleridge created, and yet it also touches on the ordinary world you and I live in, by day and by night. At twilight, get out to some place with an unobstructed view of the heavens, look up, watch the brightest stars leading the rest into their natural homes, and see if you don’t feel a silent joy at their arrival.