[O] force italic mode?

[hymie!]

Greetings.

(My first question is, can I post from gmane?)

I know how to make text italic by /surrounding/ it with /slashes/.

I know that there's a variable (org-emphasis-regex-components) that
specifies what characters are allowed before or after the markup
characters.

But let's say I don't want to mess with my document defaults.  I just
want to specify, in this one particular place, that I have the word

fuzzywuzzywuzzabear

and I want "wuzzy" to be italic.  Is there a way I can do that?

--hymie!