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Comment by benbreen | Hacker News Reader

I'm not Texan but lived in Austin for 8 years and found that this had snuck into my own speech without realizing it. I.e. I lived in East Austin and saying "going out to Krause Springs" (west); "head over to Bastrop" (east); or "go down to New Braunfels" (south) comes naturally to me now.

I'm curious though, is the phenomenon described in the article really a Texas thing? Do people in San Jose "go out to Santa Cruz" and "go over to Yosemite"?

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Up and Down aren't. They're map relative and pretty common.

Some places had a history of south-oriented maps so they may call south up and north down.

In the presence of a river, up and down often mean upstream and downstream.

In the presence of hills, up and down generally mean up and down.

I live in Santa Cruz and as far as I'm aware, up and down have no fixed meaning and may be used freely according to the whim of the speaker. My instincts tell me that a trip to Yosemite would be up, because Yosemite is located in the mountains. But I never actually talk about going there.

I was raised in the East Bay and we would head "up to Yosemite" or "up to Tahoe" because they are in the mountains, even though they are mostly eastward. Similarly, we'd probably say "up to Mount Tam" or "up to Mount Diablo" from anywhere in the Bay Area. Those are not big mountains, but they stick out of the local topography.

A weird one is we might say "up to Muir Woods" even though the approach by car feels like you're descending into grotto. But I think that is because we also think about it being north of us, related to San Rafael. In general, we'd use up/down for north/south when elevation wasn't the most significant mood.

We might head "down to Santa Cruz" if we were in Oakland since it feels like a trip south. If we were in San Jose or Palo Alto, we might say "over to Santa Cruz" because it feels primarily like traversing some mountains. But I think we would say "down to Santa Cruz" if we were in San Francisco and planning to take Highway 1 along the coast.

up the bay and down the bay can also be towards/away from the ocean in some parts of Newfoundland

On Prince Edward Island (PEI) phrases like 'Up West' and 'Down East' are the norm which seems pretty weird at first. But once you look at the orientation of the island on a map [1] it starts to make some sense.

Basically people think of the island as being laid out East to West but in reality the island is rotated ~45 degrees on the actual map. So West is really North-West and East is South-East. This leads to people combining the usual North = Up and South = Down with East-West qualifiers.

[1] https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Prince+Edward+Island/@46.64...

The "down" in "Down East" actually refers to downwind, as in a sailing direction. The prevailing winds in the area in the summer are form the southwest. So to go to Maine from Boston, one would sail "down"(wind) and east. Likewise from Maine to PEI, it would be "down"(wind) and east.

That's simplifying it a bit, because there is both 'Up East' and 'Down East', but I've never heard 'Down West'. There is also 'Out West' which refers to Alberta.

The same thing happens on the San Francisco Peninsula. People think SF is north of San Jose, when it's actually northwest.

So everything tends to be off by 45 degrees here too, and very often a full 90 degrees. For example you can drive west on North 101 and turn south onto West 84:

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4877668,-122.213475,14z

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