"In my young days," writes John Baird from Bangor, Co Down, "a bogey in golf was what we now, trotting after the Americans, call a par. Nowadays a bogey is one over par. Why is this, and what is origin of the term bogey anyway?"
To take the origin of bogey first, Oxford has this to say, quoting an article written in 1908: "One popular song at least has left its permanent effect on the game of golf. That song is The Bogey Man. In 1890 Dr Thomas Browne, RN, the honorary secretary of the Great Yarmouth Club, was playing against a Major Wellman, the match being against `the ground score', which was the name given to the scratch value of each hole.
The system of playing was new to Major Wellman, and he exclaimed, thinking of the song of the moment, that his mysterious and well-nigh invincible opponent was a regular `bogey-man'. The name `caught on' at Great Yarmouth, and today bogey is one of the most feared opponents on all the courses that acknowledge him."
It would appear that the Americans began using bogey for one over par in 1898. S.B. Flexner, in his Listening to American (1982), wrote that "after the rubber golf ball was invented in 1898, the bogey established for the gutta-percha ball became too easy and the British lowered their bogies by about one stroke per hole, and kept the term: but the Americans began to use the word par instead, keeping the old British word bogey to mean the old, easier expected score of a good player, usually one stroke more than the new par".
I'm not sure when we changed to the American way on this side of the Atlantic. I remember tee-boxes carrying signs such as Bogey Four in the 1950s, meaning of course, par four. The change deleted one figurative meaning of the word from the language. A good example of what I mean is to be found in this exchange from P.G. Wodehouse's The Clicking of Cuthbert (1922). "Weren't you giving yourself rather a large family?" "Was I? I don't know. What's bogey?"
But what's the origin of bogey? It may be a southern nursery form of bogle, or boggle, a phantom causing fright, and may ultimately have come from the Welsh bwg, ghost, bugbear, hobgoblin. But there are German words of similar form, such as boggel-mann, our bogey-man, so that uncertainty remains.
