rotten to the core
4
8.1
- idiom
- Offensive
:
corrupto hasta la médula
- This whole town council is rotten to the core!
- just rotten to the core
Examples
-
I think the USA is rotten to the core with fake intentions.
Blog text (5) -
What hope do we have as a society if we are unable to grasp and accept that it is completely plausible for our government and banking system to be rotten to the core?
Blog text (33) -
This country is rotten to the core and somebody better do something about it.
-
Take your country back and clean house on your corrupt government because it is rotten to the core!
Blog text (19) -
Sure, you have a fancy metric, but the philosophy is rotten to the core.
Blog text (1) -
They are rotten to the core.
Blog text (2) -
I tell you, Lohrmann, they're rotten to the core.
-
If a few of her supporters hate Dear Leader, why not? Anything we can get, but she's shown over the course of decades that she's rotten to the core.
Blog text (5) -
It seemed to some Victorians to have been a period in which materialism had sapped society's spirituality; the rich walked around in fine attire but were rotten to the core.
Blog text (2) -
The city's political system is rotten to the core, filled with bribery and dishonesty.
Synonyms
291
4.4
Willing to act dishonestly to gain money or power
46
7.5
Dirty and morally wrong, often involving dishonest or cruel acts
7
7.4
A person, group, or action that does not care about right and wrong
5
8.3
Having very bad character and doing dishonest things
1
9.9
Having a bad and dishonest character
Dishonest and morally ruined because of wrong actions
Spoiled and unsafe because it has rot or something harmful
Antonyms
How Corrupt
Surface Forms
Morphology
The sense 'completely corrupt' is largely inferable from combining 'rotten' (bad/decayed) with the intensifier 'to the core' (to the central or essential part), so a learner who knows the constituents can grasp the idea of thoroughness. However, the moral/corrupt sense is a metaphorical extension from a physical state and functions as an idiomatic intensifier rather than a strictly literal composition, so the relation is not fully predictable.
Etymology
Rotten to the core may come from the image of a fruit that is bad all the way to its core; when an apple is rotten inside, nothing at the centre is good. So the phrase now means 'completely corrupt' or bad at the very centre.