How do I remove the shortest & longest trailing patterns of a substring in bash shell script?

[shoebill]

Remove shortest leading substring that matches pattern.

Usage is ${name%pat}

Remove longest leading substring that matches pattern.

Usage is ${name%%pat}

declare -A MyBucketList MyKtbList MyList
MyBucketList=([1]="The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain" [2]="Go to Mars" [3]="Climb Mount Everest")
echo ${MyBucketList[1]%a*n}

The main line to observe is line 3. Running the script gives the following results. This is the shortest trailing matching pattern.

$ ./associative_array.sh
The rain in Spain stays maily on the pl

Changing line 3 to echo ${MyBucketList[1]%%a*n} and running the script again. The longest trailing matching pattern, it goes back to ain in the word rain and removes the rest.

$ ./associative_array.sh
The r