Thank you!! for the examples and lucid explanation.

I certainly don't want to restart the If you believe in Lists in Scalar Context, Clap your Hands discussion - which convinced me that "list in scalar context" is disturbing and possibly misleading enough to many people to be worth avoiding. But I have yet found no description better than what you closed with and that, while it might be quite correct, seems less than ideal as a high level abstraction by which to grok Perl. Being verbally oriented, this continues to trouble me.