KOMING

[Jan Ivarsson TransEdit]

Has ADL discussed this word? I do not find it in any dictionary, but the following source seems reliable:

KOMING
Editing notation used at the old Life magazine. Not exactly equivalent to TK (q.v.) as used elsewhere, because this was essentially an instruction to the fact-``checker'' to fill in the missing information. According to That was the LIFE (New York: Norton, 1977), Dora Jane Hamblin's memoir of her quarter century there as a fact-checker, reporter, and staff writer...
Writers and editors, faced with the need to make even the most banal occurrence seem important, reached always for superlatives or piquant details and, if they couldn't find them in the assembled newsclips and reporters' files, simply inserted the word KOMING. KOMING was a Life word which meant, in short, ``this fascinating fact will be forthcoming.''
Those who forthcomed it were the researchers. They became quite accustomed to being asked, at midnight, to fill in ``there are KOMING rivets in the bridge,'' or ``there are KOMING trees in Russia,'' or ``this was the KOMING Bingo game in history.'' Obviously on the latter the writer wanted to say ``biggest,'' but he needed a checker to prove it for him.
[Above is from p. 78, op. cit.]
An advantage of editing notations like KOMING and 000 (q.v.) is that they are recognizable and yet extremely unlikely to be intended to appear in the text of an article.
Fact-checkers were also required to put pencil dots over each word checked, as a supposed check that they had actually checked. They had to use red pencil for names, dates, and titles, and green pencil for material that could be expended in sizing.
Various national laboratories use schemes reminiscent of Life's dots in order to maintain security: guards may be required to touch the identification (ID) badge of each individual entering at the gate. The idea is that this decreases the chances that a guard will inattentively let someone through who isn't authorized to enter a secure area.

http://www.plexoft.com/SBF/K01.html

The site may have other words of interest, but also contains much of no value at all:

http://www.plexoft.com/SBF/

Jan Ivarsson, Sweden
jan.ivarsson at transedit.st