“It’s just a few bad apples” is the big one for me. The full saying is “a few bad apples spoil the bunch”, because rotting apples release gasses that quickly cause other apples to rot as well. So if you have a few bad apples in a bunch, you’ll very quickly have a bunch of bad apples.
The phrase is usually used to defend bad cops, and the irony is always lost on them when you point out the full saying. Because even the good cops uphold “circle the wagons” systems and “we’ve investigated ourselves and determined we did nothing wrong” policies that protect bad cops… Meaning a few bad cops will very quickly rot the “good” ones.
Yeah, few bad apples is one of the sayings that people use completely backwards, the other ones is “the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb” which people abbreviate to “blood is thicker than water” to mean the exact opposite.
It’s not really a phrase but anytime someone half quotes something and responds like the 2nd half of the quote doesn’t exist.
“It’s just a few bad apples” is the big one for me. The full saying is “a few bad apples spoil the bunch”, because rotting apples release gasses that quickly cause other apples to rot as well. So if you have a few bad apples in a bunch, you’ll very quickly have a bunch of bad apples.
The phrase is usually used to defend bad cops, and the irony is always lost on them when you point out the full saying. Because even the good cops uphold “circle the wagons” systems and “we’ve investigated ourselves and determined we did nothing wrong” policies that protect bad cops… Meaning a few bad cops will very quickly rot the “good” ones.
Yeah, few bad apples is one of the sayings that people use completely backwards, the other ones is “the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb” which people abbreviate to “blood is thicker than water” to mean the exact opposite.
It especially irks me when the use it to infer the opposite of the quotes original meaning.