(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

[david jones (from livejournal.com)]

Why aren't golf pars fractions?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I don't actually play golf... why would they be? Fractions of what?

[david jones (from livejournal.com)]

I don't play either.

But wouldn't one expect that the expected number of hits before the ball went into the hole was, in general, not a whole number?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Oh, I see. Yes, of course. But I don't know what the distribution is, I don't know if it *is* a mean, it might be better described as a mode.

I had a quick look online, but couldn't work out what's actually typical, but get the impression that par is actually reasonably objective. That if par is, say, two strokes to the green and two puts, then a good player can do that most of the time, but you have to get noticeably lucky to do that in *fewer* shots -- your drive would have to be *twice* as good to need only one of them.

Of course, if you're comparing your score to par, the actual mean is probably the correct answer for the most fair result. But giving a deviation might be more relevant.