David Hogg calls conventional statistical notation a “nomenclatural abomination”:

The terminology used throughout this document enormously overloads the symbol p(). That is, we are using, in each line of this discussion, the function p() to mean something different; its meaning is set by the letters used in its arguments. That is a nomenclatural abomination. I apologize, and encourage my readers to do things that aren’t so ambiguous (like maybe add informative subscripts), but it is so standard in our business that I won’t change (for now).

I found this terribly confusing when I started doing statistics. The meaning is not explicit in the notation but implicit in the conventions surrounding its use, conventions that were foreign to me since I was trained in mathematics and came to statistics later. When I would use letters like f and g for functions collaborators would say “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Neither did I understand what they were talking about since they used one letter for everything.

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