Shafer writes:
It turns out that Francis Edgeworth, who introduced “significant” in statistics, and Karl Pearson, who popularized it in statistics, used it differently than we do.
For Edgeworth and Pearson, “being significant” meant “signifying”. An observed difference was significant if it signified a real difference, and you needed a very small p-value to be sure of this. A p-value of 5% meant that the observed difference might be significant, not that it definitely was. Details are in my working paper, On the nineteenth-century origins of significance testing and p-hacking.
Perhaps knowing this history could help us talk about what to do with the word now.