The End

The final episode of The Wire (which I haven't seen yet) is called "-30-." Christopher Gabel at Grid Effect writes:

That title is just a morass of punctuation. It's how I imagine Clark Kent wrote all his columns for the paper he worked at. Not merely written prose, but prose so complex that only people who could fly are able to decrypt it.

Well, no. It's not "just a morass of punctuation." Back in the old days, a reporter would type "-30-" after the last paragraph of an article to indicate that it had reached its close -- that there was no more copy forthcoming. It used to be the case, too, that the farewell piece by a columnist would be called a "-30-" column. Very appropriate as a title, in this case.

This is all ancient history now, and I stopped using it with manuscripts a while back when it became clear that scarcely anyone had any idea why the "-30-" was there.

By contrast, TK fills a lasting need and will live forever.

UPDATE: My friend Emily goes meta-TK. Her additions to the Wikipedia entry make perfect sense, and the appoints apply just as much or more to newspaperdom or online writing.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: That would be Martin Schneider, rather, not Emily. Sorry about that.