To my surprise, in his answer, an OCaml guru defined Perl as a "domain specific language for string munging".

Why did this surprise you? It's really just a shorter way of saying

Perl is a language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing reports based on that information.

...I assume you recognise the source of that quotation? :)

There's a grain of truth in all the other clichés you cite. Java can be considered more portable than C, even though C can be compiled on more platforms than the JVM: Java is more portable in the sense that a single JAR file can run on any supported architecture. OCaml can be considered nearly as fast as C, even though idiomatic OCaml is usually much slower than C: OCaml is fast in the sense that you can rewrite speed-critical sections in an imperative style without having to switch to a different language. And so forth.

Remember that you are a monk, and instead of accepting or rejecting each cliché at face value, meditate on the words and find the nugget of truth within.