queries about exceptions(newbie)

[Payal]

Hi all,
I am trying to learn exceptions and have few small doubts from
http://docs.python.org/tutorial/errors.html
There are many statements there of the form,

... except Exception as inst:
        do something

... except ZeroDivisionError as detail:
        do something

... except MyError as e:
        do something

My questions are,
what are these "inst", "detail", "e" etc. Are they special words?
what does the word "as" do?

Thanks a lot in advance.
With warm regards,
-Payal
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