Those aren't shortcuts though, it's composition of 3 basic statements. The `(...);` says to gather the results of the statements contained within it into one result. The `._;` is a reference to the previous result. And then the `>;` is an operator that says to go fetch the children of the previous statement. So you are taking the last result and gathering it up together with any children, which is necessary in the OpenStreetMap data model where lines and areas are built up out of other objects.

Depending on the use case, the shortcut is often to add `geom` to the print statement, so instead a line with the above and a line with `out;` you just write `out geom;`.