But I'm guess I use these words not in the same sense as everybody else does,

I think it's more a question of context than definition. Yes, there is static typing in Perl. But there is also dynamic typing. It depends on how zoomed in your view is. If you're concerned with optimising arithmetic, for example, you'll find yourself extremely limited by Perl's dynamic typing. Do you have a string? An integer? An object with overloads? Something magical?

And then you try to optimise sub calls, and all you know is that you have a list of scalars. Are they the right type? If you think Perl is statically typed, then yes they are the right type since they are scalars. But if you take that view, you can't optimise anything. In reality, it's not good enough to know they are scalars.