I recently read this phrase in a newspaper article. At first I thought this might be a literal reference to Donald Trump’s political support. It wasn’t, but instead a reference to something getting worse, as in, for example, Coronavirus numbers increasing or “going south.”
Many years ago, while studying the subject of nationalism in graduate school, I came across a book that pointed out that in almost every nation-state, people in the northern part of the land tended to look down upon those in the south as less industrious, lazier, more unsophisticated…well, you get the picture.
Then I realized that, as silly as this might sound, it did seem to have the ring of truth in popular culture. It seemed to be true in the USA, both before after the Civil War, as well as in Germany and Italy. In the former, “high German” speaking (mostly Protestant) northerners look down on the Bavarian Catholics in the south even though the beer in Munich is much better than that in “Prussia,” as some of my Bavarian friends call the north. The same seems to be true in Italy, where those in Milan tend to make derogatory comments about the mobsters with names like Guido in Sicily. Darker-skinned Italians — many in the south–were sometimes referred to a “burnt pizza.”
I am not sure whether or not this is true in the southern hemisphere, and I can’t remember the name of the book in which I found this idea.
What might this mean? Is this a form of bias built into human nature? Does it have something to due with geography or climate, with those living closer to the tropics seen to be more lethargic due to the heat? If so, are these biases reversed in the southern hemisphere, with those in the more temperate south biased against those in the north?
We might ask ourselves if this isn’t just another form of color-coding racism, sometimes just disguised as “cultural differences.” If this is the case, the problems caused by racial prejudice might be world-wide and enormously difficult to address. It will not be solved by taking the term “going South” out of our slang dictionaries and our written and spoken vocabularies.
I should perhaps apologize for sounding so negative. A friend and co-worker several decades ago once told me that worrying about stuff like this meant that “I think too much.” She may have been right. I would be interested to see if any of my readers who like to play with language are intrigued by this musing. If I don’t hear comments from anyone, I will just assume that “yawl” have “gone South” on me.
3 replies on ““Going South”-Biased Language?”
This is interesting. I always thought the phrase “going south” was specific to the U.S.
I thought ‘going south’ simply meant that it was going down, dropping, diminishing, getting lower and/ or declining. On maps “south” is down, (north is up)…ergo
Hey Dick, I think that your response made my point. “Going down,” and “diminishing”, when applied to people, are pretty negative. I wonder if folks in the southern hemisphere use terms like “Going North” to mean what we mean by “Going South.”
Oh well, we must have some way to put people down and separate us from the “other,” and I guess geography works as well as any other method.