Chrysti The Wordsmith: Gone South

Hi this is Christie the wordsmith. When a project fails or communication goes arrives we might say that things are going south. Why have we chosen the opposite of north as the metaphorical direction of ruin and malfunction. Well the answer depends on the etymological theory that you prefer because there have been a number of suggestions offered for the origin of this phrase when the expression go south first appeared in the early twentieth century. It meant disappear. Leave town absque gone. In this context an American who vanished or went south probably had reason to flee to Mexico a refuge for the lawless. But in recent decades the expression has come to suggest deterioration and malfunction. The expression may have been inspired by the cartographic tradition of North situated at the top of maps so that which is figuratively going south or doomed to ruin is headed toward the undesirable bottom. By the mid 1970s the phrase had been folded into business jargon according to a

quotation from The Journal BusinessWeek dated September 1974. Quote the market then rallies falls back to test its low and just keeps heading south as they say on Wall Street. This metaphor may rely on peak and valley sales graphs that symbolize earnings as a line going up or north and losses as a downward or southward decline. I'm Christie the wordsmith. CHRISTIE The wordsmith is sponsored by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Zoot enterprises a high tech firm in Bozeman Montana offering challenging careers and innovative solutions for the financial services industry. Zoot web dot com.