What does things all went south mean in the following paragraph?
The app has been available in the Google Play store since November 12, apparently with Google's blessing, and Cyanogen says "hundreds of thousands" of users have installed it already. But things all went south on Wednesday, when the Cyanogen team apparently received an email from the Chocolate Factory informing them that the CyanogenMod Installer violated Google Play's terms and conditions.
I'm really confused by what this idiom means. Kindly help me out.
Best Answer
The human mind has a natural tendency to make metaphors to describe abstract concepts. In English, one such metaphor is
Examples:
Is the mail server up?
The server went down yesterday when the hard disk crashed.
The dictatorship rose to power in 1969.
The regime fell as a result of the coup d'état in 1974.
In the heyday of the motor industry, things were looking up.
However, since the collapse of the motor industry, Detroit has gone downhill.
He hit rock bottom when an alcoholic binge landed him in the emergency room.
He has since rebounded.
Management approved proposal A, but gave a thumbs down to proposal B.
Combine that with the arbitrary convention to orient maps with north pointing up and south pointing down, and you get an idiomatic expression "going south", meaning "turning bad".
Note that these metaphors are not always generalizable. For example, going uphill is not the opposite of going downhill. ("Uphill" usually refers to some kind of struggle.) Similarly, "going north" is not a commonly accepted expression. However, it is possible to say
… meaning "above 3 million dollars".