Upstate/downstate

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Thursday, March 4, 2004 10:49 pm -0500 sagehen <sagehen at WESTELCOM.COM>
wrote:

>
>  James A. Landau writes:
>> Yet apparently someone
> in Bletchley would think of going "up" to London and "down" to return to
> Bletchley.  Can one of our British correspondents check this out, please?
[sagehen]
> It's always "up" to London, wherever you are in Gt Britain, I believe.
> Remember The Oak & the Ash:

What I've learnt here is that it's always 'down to London'.  I live south
of London, and you go down to London from here (over the Downs, as a matter
of fact).  There's more than one song with "down to London town" in it.  In
practice, people say both.

"Down to London" gets 16000 & something hits on Google, while 'up to
London" gets about 1000 fewer.  But some of these are things like "down to
London Bridge Station" or "up to London Road", so hard to tell.

Cheers,
Lynne


Dr M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics

Department of Linguistics and English Language
Arts B133
University of Sussex
Falmer
Brighton BN1 9QN
>>From UK:  (01273) 678844
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