A cry for {hellip}

I’ve been out of town (that’s part of the reason for the yawning silence here), so I read this week’s Word column, by the redoubtable Erin McKean, on the boston.com website just now. And one line gave me a moment’s pause:

Someone, somewhere, is using [words like funner] with a disclaimer like "I know it's not a real word {hellip}"

If you read the print version, you didn’t see that {hellip} -- you saw (I hope) three dots, or ellipsis points . . . like these. I assume the {hellip} is code for ellipses, but with some crucial bit missing, so that what appears on screen is not the expected punctuation, but the command itself. It happens; just Google "hellip" for other examples, some in earlier Word columns.

There were two especially funny things about this hellip, though. First, that the phrase "not a real word" was followed by . . . a truly not-real word. Second, that the not-word fit the sentence so well: I took it, at first, as a mistyped "help!" -- the writer’s plea for indulgence in this use of a non-real word.

I’m not much of a neologizer -- with the dictionaries full of words I don’t know, I’m in no rush to coin new ones -- but in this case I’m tempted. Wouldn’t {hellip} -- or even hellip, without the curly brackets -- work nicely as slang for "I’ve just exceeded the limits of my knowledge, everything I say from here on will be just guesswork"? I for one would make good use of such a shorthand expression.