I usually solve this with a subroutine. I'll provide a few - one for regex matching and two for plain 'contains' or 'equals' matching.

The whole idea here is I'm just sticking the operator into a subroutine and calling each value in turn until either the list is exhausted or something matched successfully. I understand this somewhat of the idea behind the junction operators in perl6. Anyhow, check out List::Util for more thoughts along these lines.

 sub qrany { $_ =~ $_[0] && return 1 for @_[1 .. $#_]; return }
 sub cany { index($_[0],$_) != -1 && return 1 for @_[1 .. $#_]; return
+ }
 sub eqany { $_ eq $_[0] && return 1 for @_[1 .. $#_]; return }
 
 # Contains tests
 if (cany( $string, qw[this or_this or_that]) {....

 or
 
 # Equality tests
 if (eqany( $string, qw[this or_this or_that]) {....

 or
 
 # Regex tests
 if (qrany( $string, qr/one regex/,
                     qr/another regex/,
                     qr/yet another regex/ )) { ....
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Updated Added eqany and some comments on the usage of each

UpdatedFixed the words "three and two". Also added the second paragraph

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