One of the things I love about the blogosphere is that I feel like I’ve got a whole bunch of new colleagues whom I think of as “my buddies” even though I’ve never met them, and in some cases, we’ve never even spoken or corresponded directly. One such good buddy is Carl Abernathy who resides terrestrially in West Lafayette, IN and blogospherically at Cahl’s Juke Joint . Carl was kind enough to write in response to TK:
Newspaper and magazine folks used to intentionally misspell words that were used as instructions for composition folks. A “lead” became “lede,” for example. They did this to avoid confusion when type was still set in hot lead. You wouldn’t want the composition guys to think your instructions were part of a story.
I know that HTK was used for “head to come (kome).” So, I’d assume that TK had the same origin.
Makes perfect sense to me. I guess it got ol’ Carl to thinking, cause he emailed a second time:
I checked a little more on definitions of some of the journalism terms we still use. There’s not a lot of information online, but HTK was an abbreviation for Hed tokum.
Anyone else care to weigh in?