Don't worry about it. I ++'d your fine node, and so did a lot of other people. You posted working code that used -w & strict so, you are by definition a Righteous Dude. Everything can be improved, including what I posted.

For instance,

print "\n$word1 $word2 $word3 $word4\n" if (($ans = <STDIN>) =~ /^y/);

could have been

print "\n$word1 $word2 $word3 $word4\n" if (<STDIN> =~ /^y/i);
 
  or

print "\n$word1 $word2 $word3 $word4\n" if (<STDIN> =~ /^[Yy]/);
[download]

Updated per chromatic's suggestion to allow for case insensitive matching.