What I mean is like for example, a person having “gravitational pull” or someone making a “quantum leap” makes no sense to anyone who knows about physics. Gravity is extremely weak and quantum leaps are tiny.
Or “David versus Goliath” to describe a huge underdoge makes no sense to anyone who knows about history, because nobody bringing a gun to a sword fight is going to be the underdog but that’s essentially what David did.
I’m looking for more examples like that.
So sub-par doesn’t really imply the golf way of being good, but actually means below equal/average? Then I’m fine with using below par as a negative.
I’ve never seen sub-par used to mean positive, always as “under average”.
Same, but the implication was that it was supposedly being used incorrectly, but then it turns out it is being used correctly after all.