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[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?

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[ewx.livejournal.com]

Um, would that be a three-paragraph one-liner?

[simont]

This reminds me of a thing I was thinking this morning: the words "forward" and "backward", with regard to time, are used in a confused fashion.

If I talk about travelling forward in time in the SF sense, it clearly means I'm heading for a time later than now. Travelling backward, vice versa. But if I talk about moving a deadline "forward", it generally means it's becoming earlier, not later.

My best rationalisation for this until recently has been based on the metaphor that I'm moving along a train track in one direction, and fixed things on the calendar such as deadlines are heading towards me on the other line, moving in the other direction. So if either I or the deadline moves "forward", then the effect is the same: we reach each other sooner. And this also works in the particularly complicated case of putting the clocks forward: one might make a case either way for which of me and the deadline has moved, but in either case it's clear that putting the clocks "forward" means there's less time to elapse until I meet the deadline.

I was satisfied with this until this morning, when I was talking about one of the functions of Christmas being to cheer you up in the cold winter months, and observed that since February is often more bitingly cold than December it's when one might most need cheering up, and hence if I had free choice I might move Christmas ... forward ... a month or two. And try as I might, I can't bring myself to think that "backward" would have been a better word there, even though since Christmas is a calendar event this is directly inconsistent with the rule I describe in the previous paragraph.

So I now lack any sensible way to think about all this; I've convinced myself that my previous apparently-sensible theory doesn't in fact correspond to my linguistic intuition, and I suspect that in fact my linguistic intuition is simply hopelessly confused.

[teleute.livejournal.com]

I can't think of any situation in which I would use the term 'under par' to mean something that was both below average and numerically superior/better han average. Have you got a situation in mind you could share so I can think about it some more?

[david jones (from livejournal.com)]

Why aren't golf pars fractions?