Of cores!
When an organization (say, a police force or a government or Wall St.) goes awry and becomes (or at least reveals itself as) hopelessly corrupt, we might say it is "rotten to the core." Being an inquisitive sort, I started wondering about the physical basis of the metaphor.
I spent some time thinking about it, and I could only come up with a few relatively-common non-abstract uses of "core": specifically apple cores, planetary/stellar cores (which probably work on the apple metaphor themselves), and nuclear reactor cores. Because GIMF, I did a quick search and didn't find any other applicable uses, except a note that "the single seed in the center of a cherry, peach, plum, olive, avocado or other fruit" also counts as a core. Personally, I don't think I've ever heard them referred to as such. I always call it the pit or the stone. Does your mileage vary?
So, setting aside the stone-fruits, the only common "core" I know of that actually rots is the apple core. But I have an apple tree in my back yard which I do not apply pesticides to, and as a result 99% of the apples that come off that tree tend to have things living in them when I pick them up: mostly grubs, the occasional small beetle or earwig. (This is actually not as big a problem as it might seem. Split the apple in half, spend 30 seconds with a paring knife, and you can usually salvage at least 3/4 of a perfectly delicious uncontaminated apple, and consign the rest to the compost.)
When things start living inside apples, I've had enough apple-dissection experience to know that it's the bits all directly around the living space that rot first (I'd presume due to the wastes that have nowhere else to go). I also have enough apple-dissection experience to know that when things want to move into a pristine apple, they ALWAYS go directly for the core and set up shop in there first, expanding outward once established. It makes sense, of course (of cores!), since the core has those little hollow fibrous spaces for the seeds, which might as well be billed as a ready-to-own bug-condominium that they don't even have to bother excavating, and where all the walls are made of food. Paradise! The point is though, in all my experience with partly-rotten apples, the rot virtually always spreads outward FROM the core, not inward TO it, and it's not even subtle.
The only possible exception I can think of is the bruised apple... if you give an otherwise-good apple a good hard drop and then let it sit around for awhile, when it finally starts to go bad, it'll start at the bruise and radiate outward (and inward) from there. Which I guess begs (to ask) the question: what causes more rotten apples, stuff living inside them or bruises? More to the point, what caused more rotten apples when they coined the phrase "rotten to the core"? It would seem to me that, especially historically (pre-pesticides), bugs would probably get far more apples than bruises would, and if so shouldn't the phrase be "rotten FROM the core" instead? Which is often just how it works anyway when an organization really goes bad. Would that be telling too much truth?
I spent some time thinking about it, and I could only come up with a few relatively-common non-abstract uses of "core": specifically apple cores, planetary/stellar cores (which probably work on the apple metaphor themselves), and nuclear reactor cores. Because GIMF, I did a quick search and didn't find any other applicable uses, except a note that "the single seed in the center of a cherry, peach, plum, olive, avocado or other fruit" also counts as a core. Personally, I don't think I've ever heard them referred to as such. I always call it the pit or the stone. Does your mileage vary?
So, setting aside the stone-fruits, the only common "core" I know of that actually rots is the apple core. But I have an apple tree in my back yard which I do not apply pesticides to, and as a result 99% of the apples that come off that tree tend to have things living in them when I pick them up: mostly grubs, the occasional small beetle or earwig. (This is actually not as big a problem as it might seem. Split the apple in half, spend 30 seconds with a paring knife, and you can usually salvage at least 3/4 of a perfectly delicious uncontaminated apple, and consign the rest to the compost.)
When things start living inside apples, I've had enough apple-dissection experience to know that it's the bits all directly around the living space that rot first (I'd presume due to the wastes that have nowhere else to go). I also have enough apple-dissection experience to know that when things want to move into a pristine apple, they ALWAYS go directly for the core and set up shop in there first, expanding outward once established. It makes sense, of course (of cores!), since the core has those little hollow fibrous spaces for the seeds, which might as well be billed as a ready-to-own bug-condominium that they don't even have to bother excavating, and where all the walls are made of food. Paradise! The point is though, in all my experience with partly-rotten apples, the rot virtually always spreads outward FROM the core, not inward TO it, and it's not even subtle.
The only possible exception I can think of is the bruised apple... if you give an otherwise-good apple a good hard drop and then let it sit around for awhile, when it finally starts to go bad, it'll start at the bruise and radiate outward (and inward) from there. Which I guess begs (to ask) the question: what causes more rotten apples, stuff living inside them or bruises? More to the point, what caused more rotten apples when they coined the phrase "rotten to the core"? It would seem to me that, especially historically (pre-pesticides), bugs would probably get far more apples than bruises would, and if so shouldn't the phrase be "rotten FROM the core" instead? Which is often just how it works anyway when an organization really goes bad. Would that be telling too much truth?