Thanks for all the erudite replies. tye and chromatic are right: ProhibitNoStrict is not helping me. I don't want to clutter my code with ## no critic so I'm just going to turn off that rule in a .perlcriticrc in the code directory. It's not helping me in this case and I'm almost convinced by tye's passion that it is just a bad rule altogether. strict asks me "Are you sure you want a symbolic reference?", my no strict "refs" answers "Yes", then ProhibitNoStrict asks "Are you sure you're sure?"