Tinderbox supplies a number of 'designator' terms, use of which instead of a note's $Name or path which may infer an individual note, or in a few cases a group of notes. Item designators are generally hierarchical in their references. Designators ignore map adornments, so cannot be used to match adornments.
There are also separate series of designators designed to help date creation/calculation and the polarity of links.
Designators are generally used with attribute value references ($Name(parent)), as action or export code parameters (linkTo(grandparent), linkFrom(grandparent(original))). In some cases cases they are specific to certain operators, as with links() and the link direction designators.
Most item and group designators can use paths (or note name - if unique) to refer to data from a different note from the current context, e.g. descendants("Projects"), or use other designators as path/group proxies, e.g. grandparent(original). This makes them even more flexible in use - the section on paths for more detail.
Quoting designators or paths/titles. By convention, designators are normally not quote-enclosed in action code (i.e. queries and actions (and most export code)). Although designators are strings, not using quotes helps Tinderbox's parser to identify them as designators as opposed to notes of the same name. Designators used as path proxies - e.g. $Name(parent) - may safely be quoted. Historically, path arguments weren't quoted but since v5 there has been a move to explicitly quoting all string values. Ideally do not use notes with a $Name matching a designator also using designators in that TBX's actions (using explicit paths can route around such name collisions).
Designators are listed via their scope: