these discussions are really highlighting for me how such an apparently simple thing "enter some text at a command line prompt and maybe edit it a bit" is surprisingly pretty complex and works in many different ways, even in contexts which superficially appear to be exactly the same
(please do not try to explain to me why this is the case)
@texhewson @b0rk This!
I learned some fine ago that !* works like !! but omitting the executable name, so you can run a command with the "arguments" of the previous one. However, I haven't been able to find more. I'm not sure what to search for
I finally figured out what these things are after snooping around a bit in bash's manual. They are word designators.
https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#Word-Designators