Significance of Significant

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Abstract
SIGNIFICANCE, being one of those words that mean everything or nothing, is too convenient for the medical writer. In its refined statistical sense, significance embodies mathematical precision. In its vulgar usage, unrelated to statistical manipulations, it comfortably serves ambiguity. It permits an author to describe his clinical findings as significant, or his patients as prospering significantly, and so to impute importance to his efforts without requiring him to use an acceptable measure of that importance. It affords him, moreover, with a mobile hedge against criticism. With the label of significance, he may circumvent the more direct immodesty of claiming importance, . . .

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