Estimand

If you’ve been dragged up through the UK education system you’ll likely recall French lessons with their warnings of ‘faux amis’—those words which seem to be understandable but mean something completely different. (In my everyday life, ‘remission’ is one such—used by parents to mean ‘cancer cured’ and professionals as ‘cancer not visible’.) Statisticians are now pushing one at us with the word ‘estimand’.

I think most people will read it and either go ‘that must be …