I was talking with someone today about the wonderfully subtle ways in which words vary in their shades of meaning. Take for example the word “abnormality”.<\/p>\n
That is most definitely a pejorative word. If you describe something as an abnormality, then you are saying there is something wrong with it, and you may be implying that it needs to be corrected.<\/p>\n
But you could also choose to say that something is an “anomaly”. That sort of means the same thing, but the tone is quite different.<\/p>\n
An anomaly might be a good thing. Maybe, depending on context, you want more anomalies, and are eager to search through your statistical results to find another one.<\/p>\n
Or, you could simply choose to say that something is an “outlier”. That is a much more relaxed word.<\/p>\n
To say that something is an outlier doesn’t imply that it is either good or bad, just that it is unusual. You are not taking a stand one way or another.<\/p>\n
If anything, you are making a shrugging commentary on statistics itself. It’s as though you are saying “Oh well, we all know that numbers don’t always behave themselves. What can you do?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was talking with someone today about the wonderfully subtle ways in which words vary in their shades of meaning. Take for example the word “abnormality”. That is most definitely a pejorative word. If you describe something as an abnormality, then you are saying there is something wrong with it, and you may be implying … Continue reading “Shades of meaning”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27775"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27775"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27776,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27775\/revisions\/27776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}