go to the dogs

present singular third person goes to the dogs · participle present going to the dogs · past went to the dogs · participle past gone to the dogs

1. idiomaticinformalTo decline or deteriorate shockingly.

   "[T]he merry old ways of good life have gone to the dogs—upon my carcase, they have!"

   1874, Thomas Hardy, chapter 42, in Far from the Madding Crowd

   2 more examples

   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.

   1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter L, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […], →OCLC, page 264

   "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.

   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)

   Synonyms: go to pot, go downhill, go to shit