Alternative to my previous reply, if you don't want to "dive into" Perl Data Structures:

The problem statement turns into: "how to represent multiple messages?"

The most flexible is: as an array of individual messages. However, if you are certain there won't be, e.g., newlines in your messages, you can use that as a delimiter. That would make: In adddelays:

         $delaylist{ $_ } .= $msg . "\n";
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In listdelays:

    foreach (@nicks) {
        print "--> \cB$_\cB:\n";
        print "$_\n" for split /\n/, $delaylist{ $_ };
    }
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and finally, in delayer:

        print ("query $nick $_") for split /\n/, $delaylist{$nick};
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Luckily, split omits trailing empty fields, otherwise the code in adddelays would have to be more complicated. Thanks perl for autovivification and DWIM :-)