Hello! That's me (the pedant).

:). Your reasoning is sound.

Having hankered for say enough, that I took the time to learn enough about the sources that I could add a say keyword; when it eventually came I tried to train my fingers to use it, but in the end, just gave up and went back to print and -l on the shebang line.

My point was mostly that even when people do use feature qw[ say ];, they use it at global (file) scope. I've never seen anyone use it lexically.