(no subject)

[jack]

In golf, low scores are good, and there is a term "par", meaning the average expected number of shots to pot a ball in a particular hole: if your number of shots is below par, that's good, and above par, that's bad.

For a long time non-golf metaphoric uses of "par" bothered me. Eventually I decided "below par" could be used to mean (or correspondingly, "above par" the opposite) either numerically lower than average, or worse than average.

This has the advantage that it makes sense to people both ways round, but the disadvantage that the meaning has to be inferred from context. Are we ok with this, or should we attempt to recapture "below par" to mean "worse than average" or even "both worse and numerically lower higher than average"? Was it ever used that restrictedly?

Comments

Re: Tags

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I applied "one-liner" to not just one-line posts, but throwaway nearly-one-line thoughts, the idea being that eg. "It's snowing" might want to be filtered out if one's reading the archives. And then I never remove it if I go on talking about this throwaway thing to an extent that would make an average-long post by anyone else :)