I'm a little confused. The code you provided seems to be fine. It would help if you provided some more code for us to look at. I'm pretty sure the error is somewhere else in your script.

my $name = 'Ben Kittrell';
$name=~s/^(.+)\s(.).+$/\L$1$2/g;
my $nick = 'tha' . $name . 'sta';
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