It was standard-issue junk science: a grabby idea, a statistically significant p-value extracted from noisy data, and big claims.
As a lover of words, I was surprised to encounter the word "grabby", which I don't recall having heard before. According to one of my Oxford dictionaries (not the OED) it means greedy or grasping. I wonder if the author is subtly extending its meaning to specifically mean "grasping at straws".
According to the online Cambridge dictionary, the second entry under “grabby” is “wanting to or designed to attract attention”. But you know how those Cambridge types are…
As a lover of words, I was surprised to encounter the word "grabby", which I don't recall having heard before. According to one of my Oxford dictionaries (not the OED) it means greedy or grasping. I wonder if the author is subtly extending its meaning to specifically mean "grasping at straws".