My apologies for expressing my idea as yours, and I didn't even fully appreciate your earlier comment. With your clarification, rethinking and rereading perldata, I think I get it.

I am now inclined to replace word with word that looks like an identifier. I think this is very consistent with what perl actually does and provides a reasonably clear and concise description.

As for the bit in parentheses: it would then be redundant with the definition of identifier in perldata. So the question is: what's worse: a redundant statement or making users jump between documents?