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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. | 
