Meaning
To deteriorate, fall into decline or be ruined, especially through neglect. Said of a person's health or fortunes, a business, a building or a skill left unattended; informal and often rueful, as when a language or a garden goes to pot once someone stops tending it. Informal; suggests gradual decline through neglect rather than sudden collapse. Regional use: General English.
Origin
Originally 'to go to the pot', an image from the kitchen: meat that was past its best was cut into pieces for the boiling pot, a one-way journey. The Phrase Finder cites William Tindale's 1530 An answere vnto Sir Thomas Mores dialoge ('Then goeth a part of ye little flocke to pot'), and the wordhistories blog's earliest example is Nicholas Udall's 1542 translation of Erasmus, where the rich 'went dayly to the potte, and wer chopped vp'. The figurative sense is beyond doubt by 1682, when Edmund Hickeringill's History of Whiggism glosses the phrase ('went to Pot, in plain English, he was Hang'd'). The cooking-pot explanation is an inference from these earliest uses rather than a documented account. Since the 1960s the slang sense of pot as cannabis has prompted punning headlines, but that is unrelated to the idiom's origin.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- go to the pot
- going to pot
- gone to pot
- let something go to pot
Usage Examples
- The hotel went to pot after the founding family sold it to a faceless consortium.
- If you leave a classic car out in the rain all winter, it will go to pot.
- His mental arithmetic has gone to pot since the office installed calculators on every desk.