“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 American idiom meaning to fail, lose value, or be wrong. The expression arises from a combination of visual conventions involving graphs and maps. The term is often used in business and technical discussions.
The first documented use of the expression “going south” appeared in 1974, but in a context suggesting that the expression was already known in financial circles to indicate a downturn in the stock market. Usage of the term appears to have spread from business to technical discourse and began to become very common in the early 1990s, possibly as part of the general diffusion of computer slang into everyday speech. “Heading south” has been used to describe any failure or collapse, whether in a computer system, a business model or even a social situation. “Things were going well until his ex-girlfriend showed up,” one speaker might say, “and that’s when it all started to fall apart.”
The origin of the phrase “head south” seems to lie in the traditions of visual representation. In a chart or graph, a decrease or decline is often represented by a downtrend. For example, if sales of a product decrease, the line showing sales will start moving down. This practice relates to traditional symbolic systems that associate downward movement with negative experiences: consider, for example, the symbolic directions in the expression “the rise and fall” of someone or something.
In cartography, south is traditionally represented as being down in the reader’s orientation. As a result, “south” has become a slang term for “down.” Since “down” was associated with negative experiences, so was “south.” The upshot was that “going south” or “going south” became a term for declining market figures and from there it morphed into a term for any kind of catastrophe.
A similar expression, “going west” or “going west”, existed in British slang in the 20th century, particularly in the years between World War I and World War II. It does not appear to be related to the expression “going south”, but may refer to the ancient belief that the spirits of the dead migrated westward towards the setting sun. It may also be related to the idea of a wounded or dead soldier in World War I being shipped westward from France to Britain.
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