Earlier on (a couple of weeks, at least) after starting to use strict, I'd tried to declare arrays and had gotten error messages. To get past that, I'd started declaring arrays using splice. It always struck me as odd, but since it worked I continued to do it that way.
I didn't think of the simple declaration syntax that hdb mentioned above. I thought I had to actually do something with an array when declaring it. That's the reason I've been declaring arrays using splice, which of course I can discontinue :)