‘North and south’ is a piece of Cockney rhyming slang for the mouth. The two compass points rhyme with ‘mouth’, and the phrase is used the way any rhyming-slang term for a body part tends to be used, most often in an instruction to be quiet rather than as a neutral description. Telling someone to stop ‘going north and south’ means telling them to shut their mouth, and the phrase can also simply describe the mouth itself, as in someone having a big north and south. The insult works whether the complaint is about someone talking too much or about the shape and size of the mouth being talked about.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘north and south’?
The exact origin of the underlying slang term is not certain. What is well documented is the music hall song ‘What a Mouth (What a North and South)’, written by R. P. Weston in 1906 and first sung by Harry Champion. That song is the earliest well-documented instance of the phrase reaching a wide audience, but it is not necessarily the point at which the slang itself was coined. One guide to British slang for the mouth notes that the phrase “was popularized by a 1906 music hall song written by R.P. Weston, though it may have predated this,” which is the honest position to take: the song spread the term, and may also have been the first to put it into print, but nobody can say for certain that Weston invented the pairing rather than picking up something already current on the street.
Champion was one of the best-known music hall performers of the period, and a comic song built around a rhyming nickname for the mouth suited the style of the era’s popular entertainment, where such wordplay was common currency. Once the song had carried the phrase into general circulation, it settled into ordinary Cockney usage as a straightforward stand-in for ‘mouth’.
That everyday use has outlasted the song itself. Telling someone to stop ‘going north and south’ is still understood today as telling them to shut their mouth, and the phrase remains one of the more recognisable rhyming-slang terms for a part of the body, even among people who have never heard of Harry Champion or his 1906 hit.