I suppose these are just glob aliases, that's why they work for all types associated to a symbol.

Yup, as confirmed by reading the code for English. @- and $- have different names though, so only the ARRAY and SCALAR portion of the glob are used in those cases.

I was about to say that if you want to have a longer name instead of $_ you can just use a lexical instead (I was thinking of for loops), but I forgot about grep and map where you have to use $_. $CURRENT would work in those cases.