Teke and pronunciation: revelling in my linguistic nerd-dom.

I'm catching up on my X-Men comics, and I noticed that Marvel (and perhaps other comic book companies) has started using the word "teke" to refer to telekenesis, as in "Jean Grey picked up the car and threw it at him with her teke." (I just asked Fishy and he says they've been using it for years, but I just noticed it.) It took me a while to figure out what the hell they were talking about. I'm like, what's this 'teke' thing that Psylocke has?

Are they trying to create a new slang for their universe? Or perhaps it makes it easier on their letterers. Or saves more space on the page for the drawings.

For you non-geeks and other people out there too lazy to look it up, telekenesis (also known as psychokinesis) is the ability to move things with your mind. My question (and I'm sure one of my thousands of regular readers will have an answer for me) is: How do you pronounce it? Here are some obvious choices (sorry. I'm too lazy to use the IPA today): teekee, teckee, teckeh.

Fishy, who is fairly insistent that his way is correct, added: tee kay (t.k.) which I hadn't thought of previously. And Rogue (my friend, not the comicbook character) pronounces it "teek," which is a good one. Jesse said he uses the same pronunciation. And I suppose "taykay" isn't unreasonable, especially if u speak a Romance language.

Here's the list, in order of my preference:

teek
tee.kee
teck.ee
teck.eh
tee.kay
tay.kay
teek.eh

Of course, another possibility is that it's supposed to be pronounced "telekinesis." There are abbreviations we use in writing all the time that we don't pronounce the way they're written. Some examples:

"The room was filled with misc. toys from my childhood."

"The library has newspapers like the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, etc."

"Mrs. Vasquez baked me a cake."

We would never pronounce the above as "misk," "ets," or "murz". We just know when we see them to pronounce the full, unabbreviated words they represent. So maybe "teke" is just another space-saving abbreviation and should be pronounced "telekinesis." Admittedly, teke is different than the above in that it doesn't have a period marking it as an abbreviation, and so far, I've been unable to think of another such abbreviation that doesn't include a period. Still, the possibility remains.

My problem with "teek" is that, although it's a perfectly reasonable pronunciation of a word spelled "teke," it's entirely unobvious how it would have evolved from "telekinesis." The only decent etymology I can come up with is for telekenesis to become "t.k.," which is Fishy's pronunciation, and to go from "tee.kay" to "teek." But I don't remember Marvel ever using "t.k." in their comics in any systemitized way. (update: Fishy has informed me that Marvel does or at least did indeed use "t.k." so maybe "teek" is the winner after all.)

"teh.keh" really makes the most sense. The problem is that it sounds really dumb. Surely teh.keh would have evolved into "tek," if for no other reason than that it sounds so much better.

Any comments or help from out there is much appreciated!