Dash It All

Amazon recently offered some of George Orwell's books as Kindle Daily Deals.  The Kindle edition of DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON bears a number of negative reviews, not because of Orwell or what he wrote, but because of excessive typos and because the Kindle edition's text was apparently taken from the old 1972 Harcourt edition, wherein naughty words were dashed out to protect the sensibilities of the fragile public.  Reviewer Brian Scearce provided an excerpt from a chapter dealing with, oh dear, naughty words:

“For example, ——. The Londoners do not now use, or very seldom use, this word in its original meaning; it is on their lips from morning till night, but it is a mere expletive and means nothing. Similarly with ——, which is rapidly losing its original sense. One can think of similar instances in French—for example, ——, which is now a quite meaningless expletive. The word——, also, is still used occasionally in Paris, but the people who use it, or most of them, have no idea of what it once meant.”

One is tempted to exclaim "WTF?"  Or, in Harcourtspeak, "---?"