Say what you mean.

I don't wish in any way to belittle the recent events in Bridgend, and it certainly seems that there is something very worrying going on there, but I found myself getting extremely annoyed at one of the articles in yesterday's papers which expressed alarm at the recent incidence of teenage suicides in that area being "above average". Now think about it for a moment - by the very way in which averages are arrived at, there must by definition be data which exceeds the average, just as there must be data which is below the average - otherwise it wouldn't be the average, if you see what I mean. So such a statement is really pretty meaningless, except to indicate that the data falls at the higher or lower end of the scale - certainly doesn't mean that anything unusual is going on. Presumably what the writer intended to get across was that the number of suicides significantly exceeded the statistical norm - that is, what could reasonably be expected based on previous experience. Not the same thing at all.