go to the dogs
English
Pronunciation
Audio (AU): (file)
Verb
go to the dogs (third-person singular simple present goes to the dogs, present participle going to the dogs, simple past went to the dogs, past participle gone to the dogs)
- (idiomatic) To decline or deteriorate shockingly.
- 1874, Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, ch. 42:
- "[T]he merry old ways of good life have gone to the dogs—upon my carcase, they have!"
- 1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter L, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […], →OCLC, page 264:
- Poor devil, he's gone to the dogs altogether. He's got some twopenny-halfpenny job in the medical at Alexandria—sanitary officer or something like that. I'm told he lives with an ugly old Greek woman and has half a dozen scrofulous kids.
- 2002 February 3, Evan Thomas, "Bring Back the Exploding Cigars" (review of See No Evil by Robert Baer), New York Times (retrieved 17 Feb 2018):
- "The C.I.A. was systematically destroyed by political correctness, by petty Beltway wars, by careerism and much more." . . . Baer, who quit the agency four years ago, says he is angry about all this, but he clearly has a good time recounting how the C.I.A. went to the dogs.
- 1874, Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, ch. 42:
Synonyms
- go to pot, go downhill; go to shit (vulgar)
Translations
idiomatic: to decline or deteriorate
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