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In the original edition of "Little Pedlington and the Pedlingtonians" which I recently put in the Library, asterisms were used several times, not in the narrative as such, but as the equivalent of the modern bullet point in two of the "playbills" headlining acts at the Little Pedlington Theatre Royal. I'd never seen an asterism before, and I couldn't find them in the extended character set, nor even in wingdings, so I used something else. I even tried using an asterisk superscript, then subscript, then superscript again, but it looked woeful.
So now I know what they were called. But I still can't use them in an ebook. As for the dinkus, I agree, you only see them these days in pbooks where a scene break falls at a page end. For an ebook they're not needed. I usually signify a scene line-break by capitalising the first two or three words of the new scene, as a clue. It works for me.
"Dinkus" is obviously related to "dingus". In my Dictionary of American Slang, edited by Robert Chapman, Harper & Row USA 1987 and Pan, UK 1988, dingus is defined as any unspecified or unspecifiable obect, like gizmo.
(And it's a very good dictionary, even gets "gunsel" right, which quite a few crime writers think is the same as gunman. In fact, that use is gradually overtaking the original, which was hobo slang derived from the Yiddish gantzel.)
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