KOMING

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated 8/2/02 11:45:54 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
jan.ivarsson at TRANSEDIT.ST writes:

> KOMING
>  Editing notation used at the old Life magazine.

I don't doubt that Life Magazine really had such a word.  No other magazine
happened to pick it up, and therefore it remained a piece of strictly local
jargon, not eligible for any dictionary due to its limited distribution.  For
example, no dictionary will ever pick up the fact that my office is in "the
red-brick building" and that I prefer to park "in Bessie Coleman" rather than
"on Amelia Earhart".  There are less than three thousand people who ever have
need for those terms.

Every periodical has these in-group terms.  On the newspaper on which my
father worked (the Courier-Journal, Louisville KY), every story out of
Indianapolis was slugged "FIGHT".  My father eventually got curious about
this, and it took him some digging to discover that many years before the
Courier-Journal's Indianapolis correspondent was a man named "Feitner"

         - Jim Landau.