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rotten apple
Idioms and Phrases
A bad individual among many good ones, especially one that spoils the group. For example, The roommates are having problems with Edith—she's the one rotten apple of the bunch . This expression is a shortening of the proverb a rotten apple spoils the barrel , coming from a 14th-century Latin proverb translated as “The rotten apple injures its neighbors.” The allusion in this idiom is to the spread of mold or other diseases from one apple to the rest. In English the first recorded use was in Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack (1736).Example Sentences
Jurors heard Westwood, who also appeared in the BBC's Doctors series, was a "rotten apple" and his repeated sexual offending was "a habit, a lifestyle".
Carmen gripped The Wonderful Wizard of Oz harder as Tony kicked a rotten apple core into the gutter.
Crypto promoters will paint Bankman-Fried as merely a single rotten apple.
“When there’s a rotten apple … it must be removed. And I repeat, we’re not here to offer cover to anyone. I want to be perfectly clear,” President Nikos Christodoulides recently told reporters in response to criticism that he’s bending to the will of London and Washington.
Goodbye to a really rotten apple.
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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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