• foggy@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    This is an aside. Using the term “skews” the way you did is common and incorrect. Generally, it’d be best to avoid the word skew when referring to right leaning or left leaning political ideas.

    Why? Because a “Right Skew” would mean the data clusters to the left. And vice versa.

    Google it! I swear!

    It’s a pet peeve of mine. Not when people say it, just that it’s wrong even though it sounds right.

    Carry on.

    • SapientLasagna@lemmy.ca
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      8 months ago

      I like pedantry as much as the next person, but skew is a regular English word as well as a statistical term. It’s clear here which usage they meant.

      • foggy@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        The context they used it was the statistical term, though.

        They aren’t describing something’s appearance. They’re describing the nature of the distribution.

        They then are describing the visual aesthetic of the distribution, which is at odds with the description of the distribution. This is exactly my point. It stands.

          • foggy@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Yes it was.

            The word “skew” cannot apply to a population in any other sense than a statistical sense. It cant be stretched and malformed as the nonstatistical definition would suggest.