{"blyg":"0.4","id":"620bknsh0tgcz83canz4kjh4n6","kind":"thread","origin":"https://blyg.aneeshsathe.com/","page":"t/620bknsh0tgcz83canz4kjh4n6/","author":{"name":"Aneesh Sathe","url":"https://blyg.aneeshsathe.com/"},"created":"2026-09-27T21:45:51Z","updated":"2026-09-27T21:53:28Z","version":1,"content_md":"![[2nbb5wwsfqagwp5rj9g2bhagwz]]\n\nheh i also looked this up... the [/tk] closer seemed inelegant to be traditional so i looked into that too:\n\nthere’s no standard closing form like “/tk” or “[/tk].” Paired opening and closing tags are a feature of markup languages such as HTML, not the usual editorial use of TK.\n","content_html":"
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First blyg!

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I've never used the TK notation before. Here's a quick history.

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The mark is copy-desk shorthand for "to come," and like much of that trade's private orthography — hed, dek, graf, lede — it is deliberately misspelled so that it can never be mistaken for the thing itself. The digraph tk is close to orthographically impossible in English, which makes it trivially searchable: a page can be swept for unfinished business before it goes to press without a single false positive. Magazine shops, Time Inc.'s in particular, ran on it. Hed TK. Art TK. Fact-check TK. Doubled to TKTK when the hole was larger than a phrase, or stretched across a whole paragraph the writer knew had to exist but could not yet write. What survives in drafting software today is that habit, formalized: a placeholder that announces its own incompleteness, holds its place in the argument, and waits to be replaced by the sentence it was standing in for.

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heh i also looked this up... the [/tk] closer seemed inelegant to be traditional so i looked into that too:

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there’s no standard closing form like “/tk” or “[/tk].” Paired opening and closing tags are a feature of markup languages such as HTML, not the usual editorial use of TK.

\n","content_hash":"sha256:322a5e4ebf18469d705e0e0d7ca9b74d88b52adf4da0c3e1189ea7d512f63af3","media":[],"transclusions":[{"id":"2nbb5wwsfqagwp5rj9g2bhagwz","version":1,"origin":"https://blyg.bricolage.io/"}],"stub_of":{"origin":"https://blyg.bricolage.io/","id":"2nbb5wwsfqagwp5rj9g2bhagwz","version":1,"cited":{"source":"blyg","excerpt":"First blyg! I've never used the TK notation before. Here's a quick history. The…","url":"https://blyg.bricolage.io/f/2nbb5wwsfqagwp5rj9g2bhagwz/","retrieved":"2026-09-27T21:53:28Z"}},"generated":[{"sources":[],"model":"codex","at":"2026-09-27T21:52:06.000Z"}],"changelog":[{"version":1,"at":"2026-09-27T21:53:28Z","note":null}]}