Matthew Hankins and others on Twitter are making fun of scientists who twist themselves up lexically in order to report results that fail the significance test, using phrases like “approached but did not quite achieve significance” and “only just insignificant” and “tantalisingly close to significance.”
But I think this fun-making is somewhat misplaced! We should instead be jeering at the conventional dichotomy that a result significant at p < .05 is “a real effect” and one that scores at p = .06 is “no effect.”
The lexically twisted scientists are on the side of the angels here, insisting that a statistically insignificant finding is usually much better described as “not enough evidence” than “no evidence,” and should be mentioned, in whatever language the journal allows, not mulched.
Quomodocumque 