It comes from the orientation of a map, with north at the top and south at the bottom.
A graph of a stock’s prices trending above a level is considered “north of…”; and a falling price chart is said to have “gone south”. You can thank Wall Street slang of the 1970s.
@stanleybmanly I’ve never heard the Southern Hemisphere doesn’t like the expression. I have heard the American south doesn’t like it. Is the expression used in the Southern Hemisphere?
@JLeslie I didn’t mean to imply that countries in the Southern hemisphere use the expression, but that they resent the idea of the Northern hemisphere as ’“the top of the world”.
@stanleybmany Oh. Well, the maps used by the US show the US basically in the middle, not just that it’s North Pole up. Other maps have a different country centered in the world map. Makes sense.