Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
Exactly so. It's not a 'fill in the blanks', it's just deliberate ambiguity.
|
Absolutely. Common in 18th C. to early 20th C.
Most common for places and years. Trollope was almost unusual in making up place names. Remember it was hard to check imaginary names really were imaginary till early 20th C. gazetteers in libraries. The Internet existed for 20 years before it could be used reliably to check (it existed for email and file transfer long before the first web sites in early 1990s).
Fill in the blanks (such as swear words) is usually * per letter, the underline or sometimes an em dash doesn't signify any number of letters, it's pure ambiguity, not even a "wildcard".
I'm thinking Robinson Crusoe, early 1719, has this convention for years.