Is there a term for authorial name expurgation?
In 19th century English texts, but also seen elsewhere (e.g. Heller's Catch-22) there is a practice of omitting part of a name such as:
I was going to visit Mrs. P___, but decided to remain at home.
which is intended to shroud the name of the person. You may also find bowdlerization of a similar form in the same texts:
I'd have been successful if not for the d____d rain.
where the author (or publisher) would prefer not to use "damned". Is there a term for this practice?
Is there a modern (e.g. TeX, Unicode, HTML etc.) way to represent this typographic convention? The best I can find is the Unicode/ASCII codepoint 0x5f which has the unfortunate habit of being rendered as a continuous line "d____d" where older practice would allow for a small inter-glyph space so you could see that four letters had been omitted in "d····d".
Solution 1:
Eclipsis, "A line or dash used to show that text has been omitted", is the most precise term I know of for that practice, but it addresses the mechanism, rather than the meaning or rationale.
Some less-specific, less-related, or less-wordworthy terms: elision, omission, concealment, tokenizing, anonymizing.
Update Re "Is there a modern ... way to represent this typographic convention?", in LaTex there seem to be only three non-math dashes, i.e. -, --, ---, the latter two forming en- and em-dashes respectively. Perhaps try tex.stackexchange for more typography help. For lightweight expurgation, consider \cdots for centered dots. For lists of Unicode and HTML dashes, see jkorpela's dashes article on cs.tut.fi; for example, U+2012 or ‒ is a figure dash, ‒.
Solution 2:
I would go for ellipses
Those dots that come in the middle of a quotation to indicate something omitted are called an “ellipsis” (plural “ellipses”): “Tex told Sam to get the . . . cow out of the bunk house.” Here Tex’s language has been censored, but you are more likely to have a use for ellipses when quoting some source in a paper: “Ishmael remarks at the beginning of Moby Dick, ‘some years ago . . . I thought I would sail about a little’ —a very understated way to begin a novel of high adventure.”
Ellipses is a general term also known or spelled as: elipsis, elleipsis, eclipsis.
The dictionary entry mentions:
a set of dots (...) indicating an ellipsis
Wikipedia article also specifically mentions:
Bringhurst writes that a full space between each dot is "another Victorian eccentricity."
Eclipsis is probably a misspelling, but it has a very nice conotation of hiding, where ellipses is simply omission. Both terms are normally defined for a word or longer part of text and there is hardly mention of omitting parts of the word or individual letters.
Wiktionary entry for eclipsis has a meaning of
A line or dash used to show that text has been omitted
which seems to be the exact thing that you are after.
However some sources define ellipses as
A set of three dots, periods, or dashes in a row
Some list them as synonyms.
Given all of the above, I would say that eclipsis and ellipses are terms which are not as precise as you might like. Therefore, take you pick.
Keep in mind that ellipses is used much more often than eclipsis, so you will definitively have to establish the context and explain what you mean by it. However, you will probably have to do the same for ellipses because it would most likely be taken to mean … - a single glyph made from three dots.