“Going south” is an American idiom meaning failure, loss of value, or being wrong. It originated from visual conventions involving graphs and maps. The term spread from business to technical discourse and became common in the early 1990s. “Going west” was a similar British slang term. The expression “going south” or “going south” is an […]

The idiom “go south” means something is getting worse. It’s a lighter way to talk about negative trends, and it may have originated from profit or sales numbers appearing to point south on a map. British English speakers used “going west” instead. In America, the west is associated with positives, which may have led to […]