C Shell history, backprimes Q's -- Noddy Level

[Ian Watson]

OK, a simple one from a neophyte...

I've just entered a command 'foo bar parm', when what I wanted was
'foobar parm'.  I've tried the history mechanism of the C Shell, but
it seems obsessed with treating the erroneous command as a sequence
of words, and so I can't seem to get the substitute to recognise
'o b', as this spans words.  The few Unix folks round here are all Korn
shell users.  I refuse to change until I've sussed this one, as I'm too
pigheaded.  I'm browned off with combos of '," and \ to quote that 
damned space, what'm I doing wrong ?  Is there any 'conceptual user
model' to the mechanism that'll give me an insight into how I might
tackle such stumbling blocks logically in future ?

Also, why does

echo `man ps`

give

Missing ].

as an error message ?  I guess it's to do with formatting, but I read that
the output within backprimes is meant to be 'straightened'

Thanks in advance
Ian Watson