Of cores!

[mtext]

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

Comments

[thor_leifson]

Check the Oxford English Dictionary for the origin, but I do believe it refers to apples, which were stored in barrels for long periods during long voyages. So it's not a case of still being attached to the tree, but having been in a dark musky barrel for half a year.

[mtext]

Oh what's the fun in just going and looking up the answer when you can spend a pleasant hour or two flailing about with suppositions and reasoning your own way through! :P

Anyway, the OED online wants a subscription to get at most of it, and I didn't care about the actual answer enough to make a special trip to the library.

If it's barrels, then I could see losing more apples to bruising than otherwise, but I wonder how they kept the bugs off before pesticides. Most of mine are clearly occupied even while still on the tree, and it's only the rare one that has no visible bug-entryway on it at all. Perhaps they just took anything as long as it wasn't more than half-black already and counted on the apple-occupants to suffocate sealed in the barrel before eating through too much more.