Learn English – Opposite for “gold standard” for a benchmark of awfulness

antonymsphrase-requests

A metaphorical meaning of "gold standard" is something that is really good to be compared with. For example, Wiktionary says

  1. (idiomatic) A test or measure of comparison that is considered ultimate or ideal.

    The OED is the gold standard for English dictionaries. Everyone wants to see how their version measures up to that ideal.

Is there an example of a benchmark of awfulness, such that if something is worse than item X, then it is very bad?

An example of how this would be used is

Recently, Kazakhstan has become the _____ for backwardness, with news articles saying that Australia's education system or internet speed is worse than Kazakstan's.

Neither Oxford Dictionaries, the gold standard in dictionaries, nor Wiktionary mentions any antonyms.

Best Answer

Lead Standard

Recently the term lead standard has been used to contrast with gold standard. For example, the authors of a 2015 Queensland Times article, “Integration, assimilation should be gold standard”, write:

High concentrations of people in one suburb all maintaining a different language, culture and some religious practices is a problem. Add high unemployment and welfare dependence and this is the "lead standard" that is causing a lot of problems in Europe.

In this syndicated 2017 article from Raycom News Network, “Lee Zurik Investigation: Gold standard for ethics, lead standard for enforcement”, then-State Treasurer John Kennedy is quoted saying:

Kennedy says, "One of the things I took away from your series is, you can argue about whether Louisiana has a gold standard of ethics laws. But no reasonable person could argue that our standard of enforcement is anything more than, I don't know, lead or tin."

In this 2013 article on “Screening for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in Primary Care” from the US Department of Veterans Affairs we read:

Non-independent comparisons of signs and symptoms with a standard of uncertain validity (which may even “incorporate” the sign or symptom result in its definition) among “grab” samples of patients plus, perhaps, normals. In addition to the biases of Level IV, these studies often include the sign or symptom result as part of a “lead standard,” resulting in a self-fulfilling prophesy. The results extravagantly over-estimate accuracy.

Other recent examples of lead standard in this sense can be found here and there, but the term is still far more commonly seen in discussions of safety standards for lead-exposure limits. You’re therefore probably safest using it only in contexts that also mention gold standard, like in this statistics quiz.

Related Topic