This page is a fragment of a dictionary of received ideas of statistics. Most of the entries were composed one conference evening after too much wine. It is obviously modeled after Flaubert's famous compendium but inevitably is only the palest shadow of the work of Le Maître. As a restorative you can find a rather roughly scanned version of Flaubert's Dictionary in English. For the original: en français.

Bayesians: Ask: How should one compute the discounted expected utility of one's afterlife? See Pascal's wager.

Casual Empiricism: cite Virgil, "ab uno disce omnes", from one example all is revealed.

Causal Inference: see Casual Empiricism.

Chance: Ask what does "a 40 percent chance of rain" mean in Iowa? Also mention the fabulous painting "Allegory of Fortune" by the 16th century Ferrarese master Dosso Dossi.

Co-median: the median of a distribution, F, is usually defined, in accordance with cadlag conventions, as the infimum of the set of values, S = {x | F(x) >= 1/2}. This is the smallest value that minimizes E |X - mu|. When there are several minimizers of this expectation we may refer to the other (larger) ones as co-medians.

Confidence: What science wants, and the statistician lacks.

Error: Cite Pareto: "Give me fruitful error anytime full of seeds, bursting with its own contradictions. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself."

ESP: Quote Mosteller "If there is ESP, that is exciting. However, thus far it does not look as if it will replace the telephone." (1991 Stat. Science)

Finance: the alchemy of modern science.

Gambling: mention Aldous Huxley's comment, "...the relation between craps and Reality is a real one", letter of December 1969, cited in OED.

Gauss: mention J. L. Berstein's advice, "it is wise to degauss the heads prior to each recording session." Cited in the OED.

History: Statistics with small samples. Cite Mark Twain, "History doesn't often repeat itself, but it rhymes."

Image Processing: Suggest the sphinx as an example of image denosing.

Literature: Statistics with falsified data.

Love: Brownian emotion.

Martingale: In France mention Rabelais' socks, citing the OED.

Median: is the message.

Normal: Mention Stigler's comment, "a rare one-word oxymoron". see also Gauss.

Pascal's Wager: quote Diderot, "Any Imam could just as well reason the same way."

Probability: Flip a coin for DeFinetti or Kolmogorov versions, see Chance.

R: what comes after Q. Quote Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse): "It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England reach the letter Q.... But after Q? What comes next?... Still, if he could reach R it would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q then is Q--R--.... "Then R..." He braced himself. He clenched himself.... "...In that flash of darkness he heard people saying--he was a failure--that R was beyond him. He would never reach R. On to R, once more. R---.... "...He had not genius; he had no claim to that: but he had, or he might have had, the power to repeat every letter of the alphabet from A to Z accurately in order. Meanwhile, he stuck at Q. On then, on to R."

Regression: is demeaning.

Robustness: Burned with such intensity that, like Marxism-Leninism, only the ashes of the most pure remain.

Smoking: Say R.A. Fisher found it healthy and thereby became wealthy.

Statistics: The (futile) attempt to offer certainty about uncertainty. Cite Kafka, "I have reached the stage that I no longer desire certainty."

Structural estimation: see strictural estimation.

Strictural estimation: estimation subject to one or more strictures, cite OED -- " There is no strictural obstruction to the progress of the faeces." J.M. Duncan (1886).

Test: Quote "Joe" the CIA's chief "expert" on Iraq's aluminum tubes and their potential role for WMD, testifying in Congress on why he didn't consult Energy Department experts on the subject: "Because we funded it. It was our testing. We were trying to prove some things that we wanted to prove with the testing." (NYTimes, Oct 3, 2004). Mention that in sequential analysis this is called testing to a foregone conclusion.

Tukey: "never estimate intercepts, always estimate centercepts!" Quote von Neumann's comment: "There is this very bright graduate student, and the remarkable thing is that he does it all on milk." (Brillinger's (2002) obituary in the AMS Notices.)

Truth: see error. Ask: is it true that Somerset Maugham coined the the phrase "Nothing is too rum to be true"?