Lawrence caught it before I went and killed myself. Seriously you haven't lead me astray very often.What the . . . oh, I had history aliased for some reason, to history -t %FT%T 0. Convenient when I type it by itself, but too late for -m by the end of it; I so rarely use the command that I didn't notice I'd restricted myself that way. Sorry for the added confusion.
(I replaced it with a function that only adds those arguments if I didn't supply any already.)
I still think from Ray's mention of "words" that he was reading documentation about history expansion rather than pattern-matching.