Whoa, had no idea that this would spark such a lively discussion. Excellent.

I had intended to use say as an example - but it turned out to be the problem, huh? Ha! Go figure.

LanX - did not know about use if, so that's a neat plus. Hopefully you haven't quite yet learned your lesson about reading and replying to my ridiculously long posts ♥

Also comforting is that most of my solutions will work with normal non-CORE:: namespace imports.

As for all the advice in regards to how I ran into this question - debug output style/best practices and such - in the future I'll be going with aitap's great suggestion: Log::Log4perl. Very flexible and feature-rich, thanks for the tip!

BrowserUk, after diving the rabbit hole of replies, my question is/was/will be where do these definitions reside and how do I get at them?
Not so much how to get around a silly design decision I made =D
As usual, thanks for pointing me towards some great reading material. I'll definitely be playing around with Devel::Pragma to investigate any future questions in this vein.

So here we go:

• say lives in CORE::, where it can (usually) be accessed
• See ex::override for overriding CORE:: functions.
• use feature 'say' enables say as an operator - which means that once created it cannot be redefined.
• use if works, but has some constraints concerning order of your sub and verbosity definitions.
• Using say for debugging is silly - but educational!

Thanks to all of you for the great replies and entertaining repartee ;)