Skip certain words between two symbols characters

Yes, just remember that my speech replacements work only within one sentence. The above example with *brown* would work, because it is within one sentence. The regular expression for anything between two stars is:
 
\*.*\*
 
If you only want to restrict the word contained between the stars to letters (so that e.g. something with numbers or even a space would not work:
 
\*[a-z,A-Z]+\*
 
etc. I could help more if I knew specifically what you need to do. Thanks!
 
Greg