Support for wildcards

I have no idea if this is even possible or not, but it would be a pretty killer feature to allow for wildcards (*) in the strings, or even something like $1, $2, etc.

Example use case: I'm using a module that allows you to publish/unpublish nodes more easily, and if I publish a node with a title John Doe, then it will do a drupal_set_message() of something like "Node 'John Doe' has been published". However, I need it to say "The profile request from John Doe has been approved". Obviously, I can't do one string override for that since the title will change every time, so it would be great to replace John Doe with * or $1 in the string override.

Like I said, no idea if it's possible or not, but it'd be nice.