Longtime reader David Ballard emailed yesterday to alert me to a sentence he read in the Washington Post:
“….and fired him two years later, after he declared that Trump’s loss in the 2020 election wasn’t down to fraud.”
He was interested in the two-word phrase in italics, which he (correctly) felt was British.
Now, “down to” can mean awfully many things. Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary has trawled the internet and come up with a couple of dozen examples, of which this is a selection:
–Then, scroll down to find the Passkeys section and tap on it.
— It’s marked down to just $145 right now—a third of the price of the Dyson Animal.
— The game was down to a one-point margin, 70-69 with Iowa in the lead, in the last few seconds of the game.
— Lambert joined in on singing the chorus, and the pair rocked along while jumping up and down to the beat.
— Today, the plates have slowed back down to their normal speed.
— But this one will get the temp down to 64 degrees at its coolest setting.
— But now that things were down to the wire, Bowser’s team returned to Lee’s staff to try once again.
— Chaz is a friend, and Jimmy is always down to help out his friends.
— The man then kneels down to allow the older dog to get a closer look at the puppy.
— Their third choice receives eight points, fourth choice seven points — and so on, all the way down to one.
— One day Botting headed down to the quarry to search for more sponges.
— Joshua Estrada had a sack on fourth down to frustrate the Pirates.
That doesn’t even include a least a couple of other uses. One I think of in connection with the 1974 Joni Mitchell song “Down to You,” which has these lyrics:
Lost or changing as the days come down to you
Down to you
Constant stranger
You’re a kind person
You’re a cold person too
It’s down to you.
Then there’s the idiom in a sentence like, “I put his mistake down to carelessness”–that is, meaning “attribute.”
I think the British expression actually came from that. The OED lists two closely related meanings, and has only British citations for both. The first is defined as “to be attributable to” and the first quote is from The Times in 1955: “Wattam said: ‘It’s down to me, the stamps and postal orders belong to me. They are nothing to do with the wife. I’ve done all the jobs.’” The second means “To be the responsibility of” and seems to have originated in police jargon; the first citation is from a 1970 study of Scotland Yard. This 1986 quote is from City Limits: “The clothes are by Jean-Paul Gaultier, the basslines are by Blackmon, and the dancing is down to you.”
Besides the Washington Post quote, Merriam-Webster provides these examples from American publications, though I can’t vouch for the nationality of the authors:
- “This is all down to memory-bandwidth limitations on the Nvidia cards, due to their 128-bit interface. ” PCMAG, 25 Jan. 2025
- “The reason for such fulsome praise is down to the warm but detailed sound that the GO link produces.” Travel+Leisure, July 2024
Other U.S. examples? That’s down to you, readers.
notoneoffbritishisms.com 
the Joni Mitchell song is certainly pertinent, but the song with this kind of “down to” in the lyrics that immediately comes to mind is “Under My Thumb” by the Rolling Stones. British band, obviously, but a very well-known song in North America
Is the incorrect use of “fulsome” common in the US?
To me the real story isn’t ‘down to’ as a reference to a process of winnowing, refining, reducing or depleting, which are concepts that are rather easily related to each other.
To me, it’s the structure of the AAVE usage of ‘down’, which carries a sense of ‘agreeable’ or ‘sympathetic’ but also ‘understanding’. To be ‘down’ with Eddie means that you understand him and find him agreeable. To be ‘down’ with the street means that you understand it, and to be ‘down’ to help means that you find helping agreeable.
The expression seems to span a continuum from understanding to sympathy which implies a conceptual connection between the two that is, at least as I see it, more interesting than the conceptual relationship between ‘down to the last minute’ and ‘down to me.’
I can remember a Radio4 discussion thirty odd years ago about whether “down to you” and “up to you” had the same meaning. In one sense they both meant “something you have to do” In another sense “down to you” meant “it’s your fault”.
‘Up to you’ – your choice
‘Down to you’ – your responsibility
Here’s Jethro Tull in 1971 using what might be thought of as an Americanism:
Take her to the cinema
And leave you in a wimpy bar
You tell me that we’ve gone too far
Come running up to me
Make the scene at cousin Jack’s
Leave him to put the bottles back
Mends his glasses that I cracked
Well that one’s up to me, hey