I dislike that particular warning and routinely turn it off with:

no warnings 'uninitialized';
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Some people claim that the warning helps them catch mistakes... with my coding style it tends to be a false warning. YMMV.

Since it is lexically scoped, you can turn that warning off for a particular section of code like this:

$word = $required_prefix . $word;
{
  no warnings 'uninitialized';
  $word .= $optional_suffix;
}
[download]

-Blake