You and I both know you're not dense, so this miscommunication is probably because we're talking from different points of view.

In order to explain to someone that one can see a list assignment in scalar context without having the list in scalar context, one must often first explain that there is a difference between a syntactic list of scalars and a semantic list of values (as merlyn did pretty simply elsewhere in the thread) and you may also have to explain what that difference is.

In order to explain that the list to the left of a list assignment and the list to the right of a list assignment are both in list context and that the assignment itself is in scalar context (which is an edge case normally best left as separate statements for clarity anyway) one must explain to anyone who doesn't understand "context" not only "context" but also "operands", "side effects", and possibly "infix notation", "arity", and "associativity".