And println is too long, compared to say ;-)
I personally believe that this is serious enough not to warrant a ;-) since the keyword is huffmanization. IME I tend to print ... "\n" just as often or more than in "\n"-less form so in oneliners and minimal example scripts I tend to use -l quite a lot. But that is bad and risky in that as sometimes it pops up, it can interact with modules that do actual prints. And module authors probably should not be concerned with setting local $\ accordingly. So for all these reasons and for the others that have been said here thus far, however simple it is say() is welcome, and a blessing!