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What does 'South by Southwest ' mean? Last week, President Obama spoke to some of the best minds in the tech world at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas to appeal to their civic duty.
Mar 18, 2016 12:52 AM
Answers · 5
1
It's the name of an annual event that takes place in Austin, Texas. Here is the wikipedia article. I don't know much about it myself, but it seems really cool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_by_Southwest
March 18, 2016
As Lee says, it's a music and culture festival that happens in Austin, TX (which has something of a reputation for live music). I suppose it's an allusion to Austin's somewhat southerly position in the American Southwest (which rather confusingly isn't actually in the southwest of the US -- that would be California or Hawaii, depending on how you look at it, neither of which are included in the term). The form of the name is evocative of Hitchcock's great film "North by Northwest", which itself seems to refer to a point of the compass, such as "northwest by north", but the point "north by northwest" is presumably what is more often called "north-northwest", and similarly for "south-southwest" in the case of this festival.
March 18, 2016
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