Coming up on Word Matters, we answer your questions.
I'm Emily Brewster,
and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Neil Servin, Amon Shea, Peter Sokolowski,
and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
We always invite our listeners to write to us with language-related matters that annoy or confuse or merely puzzle them.
And today we're going back to the mailbag to address some of your most recent concerns.
Here's Amon Shea.
Listener Bobby Cope writes in with a question,
I'm wondering about the phrase when something goes south,
meaning has failed or fallen apart, etc. And he wants to know,
did this phrase have its origins in the Civil War?
Many phrases did have origins in the Civil War.
Perhaps one of the more notable ones was deadline,
which was a line past which you would be shot if you walked,
which came from prison camps in the Civil War.
But to the best of our knowledge, something having gone south, usually go south,
went south or headed south, did not originate in the Civil War.
For the sense that Bobby Cope is referring to,
our earliest citations tend to be in reference to finance.