The word was "dereference," which means "to get at the thing pointed to by the reference." If you're familiar with C, references are a lot like pointers, except that you can't do arithmetic on them; they're essentially read-only. So for instance:

my @array = qw(a b c d);  # create an array
print $array[2];          # prints 'c'
my $arrayref = \@array;   # create a reference to the array
print $arrayref->[2];     # prints 'c'.  The arrow is required when 
                          # getting an element of an array or hash 
                          # pointed to by a reference
my @newarray = @{$arrayref};  # dereference $arrayref to get at the 
                              # array it points to, and 
                              # copy it to @newarray
print $newarray[2];           # prints 'c'
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