The current usage of “a few bad apples” bothers me.
A few bad apples spoil the barrel. If you put a rotting apple in with three dozen good ones, every adjacent apple will be rotting within days. “A few bad apples” does NOT mean “we have a good barrel but, oh well, sometimes bad things happen.” “A few bad apples” means “Our entire organism is rotting from the inside out, triggered by the actions of a few and perpetuated by the natural processing of the whole.” When you say “we had a few bad apples” your next words had BETTER be “we excised them, quickly and permanently, and checked the remaining ones to make sure they’re still good.”
This has been my rant, thank you.
OH MY GOSH. I NEVER KNEW THE FULL QUOTE:
holy oh my goodness vanilla scented MOTHERFCUKER
The actual meaning of ‘don’t let one apple spoil the bunch’ is: “REMOVE THE FEW BAD APPLES BEFORE THEY SPOIL THE BUNCH.”
The idiom was never meant to defend the bad apples. You absolutely can judge a barrel by its few bad apples. There is no room for bad apples.
This is literally the opposite of what they’ve been telling us.