Hey! I'm sure there's a reason this hasn't been done, so I'll suggest it and hope for a lecture. :) Sometimes I want to emphasise just part of a word (I'll use the company name socialgrow as a running example), so I insert a zero width non-breaking space around the emphasis marks, like so: social[zewinbsp]*grow*. My thinking is that this will let Org think they are two separate words, but in any real sense they stick together (no linebreak across them, zero spacing between them.)
However, this requires one to add the zero width non breaking space to the pre component of org-emphasis-regexp-components, which is not the default. Any reason that is so? Regards, Chris