Because $small and $large are being passed through the map. You need to add parens to the map arg list:

$sth->execute(map(scalar param($_), qw(cat itemid price des longdes si
+ze o1n o1o o2n o2o o3n o3o c1n c1v c2n c2v c3n c3v)),$small,$large) o
+r die $dbh->errstr;
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-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker