Yeah, you can do other nifty stuff with ^ too, like a dynamic Highlight list. The highlight list allows vars/identifiers as items. So you can put a %myhilite var in the list and have something like:
on ^*:text:*something*:#: set %myhilite somethingelse
mirc will fire the ^ event, set %myhilite accordingly and then apply the highlight settings with the updated variable