Originally Posted by jonwvara

Sorry for another frivolous post, but these are the kinds of thinks you end up thinking about after ten days of sitting around with bronchitis:

Is "it's all downhill from here" good or bad? In a cycling context, it's almost always good, as in "Cool! Here we are at Emery Pass--it's all downhill from here." But in other contexts it's the opposite, as in "Old Uncle Joe was doing pretty well, but then he broke his hip and it was all downhill from there."

It seems to me that both meanings are used about equally. And a maybe I'm imagining this, but when the analogy is used in the present tense (the Emery Pass example), it generally has a positive meaning. When it's in the past tense (the Old Uncle Joe example) it's more often the negative version.

And what about "a rolling stone gathers no moss?" Is it good to gather moss, or is it something that should be avoided?

Life is so complicated sometimes.