Par for the course

Reader question:

Please explain “par for the course” in this sentence: “The Bernie Madoff affair was par for the course in the hedge fund industry - the owners of the funds relying on handshakes and relationships, rather than analysis and professional diligence.”

My comments:

First of all, Madoff is the person who made off with billions of investor’s money in the biggest Wall Street fraud in history. For this, he’s jailed for 150 years.

In the above example, by “par for the course”, the author means to say it is not surprising that the Madoff affair occurred because the hedge fund industry was always fraught with malpractice and irregularities. In other words, people expected something like this to happen.

Now definitions. “Par for the course” is originally a golf term. In the game of golf, they keep score by the number of shots a player takes to complete a hole.

At the professional level, there are 18 holes for the whole golf course. And they used the word “par”, meaning average, to describe the difficulties of each and every hole. Hole No. 1, for instance, may be a Par 5, that means it normally takes 5 shots for a player to strike the ball into the hole – if, that is, he makes no major errors, hitting no trees or landing the ball in sand or water. If you make it with 5 shots, you’ve done what you’re supposed to do. Nothing to brag about.

In other words, par is normal, commonplace, nothing to write home about. Under par in golf is better than par. Over par is worse. However, metaphorically speaking – that is, when you are not describing a golf game – below par is worse than average, therefore bad. Above par is better than average, therefore good.

Par for the course? Par for the whole course of 18 holes at the professional level is 72 shots. If Tiger Woods, for example, finishes a round with exactly 72 shots, then he is par for the course. This doesn’t happen a lot, actually. More often, it would be like 68 or 69 for Tiger – that’s 4 under par, or 4 or 3 shots below (better than) average.

You the novice may finish the same course with 100 shots. That will be 28 over par. It’s good exercise for taking a walk on the grass any day, but that kind of score is clearly not going to get you in the same neighborhood, or universe, with good golfers, let alone Tiger.

And so we’ll let Tiger alone and examine a few more examples of idiomatic use of “par for the course”.

1. Simon Peter and his friends were tired. They had spent the entire night fishing and had nothing to show for their efforts. It was probably not the first time. They were seasoned fishermen and a night like that was par for the course. Having secured their boats they were now washing their nets, no doubt getting ready for their next trip out whenever that would be.

- JAMAICA NEWSWEEKLY, Jamaicans.com, January 16, 2009.

2. It is still valuable to have night time routines, with familiar things happening each night, quiet times, low lights, a bath and singing lullabies etc, but you are really just setting the scene for later on, to expect that a baby will always respond to routines the same way is not realistic at this stage. If your baby is waking, then he needs you for something, so sleep deprivation for parents is par for the course I’m afraid for the first couple of years!

- Three Month Old Is Now Waking Up At Night, Easybabylife.com, March 05, 2009.

3. The tripod socket continues to be not aligned with the center of the lens. While this is par for the course in this category of cameras, it is still annoying, especially considering Canon provides a panorama assist mode on this camera.

- Canon PowerShot SX1 IS review, DPReview.com, March 2009.

4. Getting involved in a lawsuit will get the heart pumping whether you are the suing party or the defendant. Things will start off in one big rush, but then you’ll notice something. Things certainly seem to have slowed way down. The question for many people is why is this taking so long? In this article, I aim to give you the answer.

Thirty days. It is a magic number in civil litigation for just about every field. Why? It is the interval given to one party to respond to something the other party did. Since parties are constantly in dispute, the 30 day periods of action and reaction can add up very quickly. Let’s look at an example.

I file a lawsuit against you. You have 30 days to respond or contest something in my written complaint. Your attorney advises you that a motion should be filed to contest some of the things I say in the complaint. You agree and the attorney files the necessary papers, often called either a Motion to Strike or a Demurrer. Court rules then allow me a certain amount of time, often 15 to 30 days, to respond to your response before we have the court hearing. The hearing, of course, is set out another couple of weeks.

We finally end up in front of the court 45 days after I filed the original lawsuit. The judge agrees with some of your points and strikes out part of my complaint against you. As is par for the course in most states, the judge gives me 30 days to amend my complaint. I do so. We are now 75 days out from the filing of the complaint, 2.5 months, and we haven’t even begun to get into the lawsuit!