I am working on a book this afternoon, and I see TK in the front matter, and finally I decide I am going to look and see if I can find where TK comes from, its history, and so on.



So I find these when searching around:



"Ask mb" on Mediabistro: "TK: A place marker used in drafts of an article to indicate missing information. It's short for tokum, which is the intentional misspelling of 'to come,' as in 'more info to come.'"



A comment from pkimelma on the Freakonomics NYT blog: "Many years ago, when I was doing typesetting (for fun), I was told that TK comes from Taceo Kal (Kal short for Kalendarium of course) or perhaps Tacite Kal. This reads as “Pass over 1st time” (or “Be silent 1st time”) if my memory of Latin is any good.The guy that told me this said that it was used in manuscripts going back 100s of years, and sometimes is still found in very old Religious tracts."


I see this a good deal in the books that I work on, so it is still prevalent as far as I can tell. Just wish I had a more definitive answer to who started using it and why it is a K ...