I visited Merriam-Webster online just now.  Due to browser sluggishness, the consonants in the phonetic display of "bookkeeper" loaded first (presumably because the vowels, which are all represented with accent marks, are special characters).  For just an instant, M-W was an all-consonant dictionary!

When to sad Music silent you listen,
   And tears on those eyelids tremble like dew,
Oh, then there dwells in those eyes as they glisten
   A sweet holy charm that mirth never knew.

I was the only adult in the world who knew that ... a single letter of the alphabet would suffice for the entire encyclopedia.  —Sandi Kahn Shelton, Sleeping Through the Night and Other Lies

Here's the "One Letter Words Monkey," by Adam Koford.

Did you see this Slate headline? What exactly is the dirty word in question?

The headline has a couple of problems. Leaving out the colon between heading and subheading I can understand for clarity purposes [comedy drum roll]. But there's clearly a typo in the third word. Dirty words spelled with random symbols are simply nonsensical. My understanding is that letter substitutions were originally made carefully, not randomly. "Shit," for example, would have been written with a dollar sign for the "s", a pound sign for the "h," an exclamation mark or inverted exclamation mark for the dotted "i", and a dagger for the "t."

Such code is technically meaningless but clearly readable for content. Somewhere along the way, readers apparently weren't clever enough to decipher the obvious code and assumed that dirty words were to be represented by random symbols. And today even Slate boldly perpetuates the error, in bold type no less.

Granted, perhaps Slate meant to coin a new dirty word pronounced "IAHS." I'm game enough to try it out on occasion. Or perhaps Slate has something against the International Association of Hydrological Sciences, or the Institute of Applied Human Services, or even Indo-American Hybrid Seeds.

But that would be horseshit of an entirely different color.

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J wrote:

Prior to the digital age, it was not uncommon for a typesetter to stumble
and upset an entire drawer of metal type onto the floor.  The stream of
colorful language that escaped the typesetter's mouth at such a moment
came to be represented, in print-shop legend, by the chaotic heap of type
at the clumsy individual's feet.  This may be the origin of the notion
that profanity is best represented by a random assortment of characters.

A flimflam flopped from a fillamaloo.
—Eugene Field, "The Fate of the Flimflam," Poems of Childhood (1894)

Murray responds:

Now I've spent a good chunk of my morning looking for a picture of a "fillamaloo" or even a simple definition. Nothing comes up on the Internet. What am I supposed to do--imagine it!

Robert D Strock writes:

As a youngster, (I am now 85 years old), an old-timer described a "fillamaloo bird" as a native of Panama.  Its right leg was longer than its left, so it was a hill dweller that always walked clockwise around the hills.  It could fly upside down and backwards, and did so in ever decreasing circles until it flew up its rear end.  It then would scream "fillamaloo", which translates as, "Gee, it's dark in here."  He didn't have a picture of the creature.