“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.
Blood is thicker than water is a proverb in English meaning that familial bonds will always be stronger than other relationships. The oldest record of this saying can be traced back to the 12th century in German.[1]
Writing in the 1990s and 2000s, author Albert Jack[18] and Messianic minister Richard Pustelniak[19] claimed that the original meaning of the expression was that the ties between people who have made a blood covenant (or have shed blood together in battle) were stronger than ties formed by “the water of the womb”, thus “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb”. Neither of the authors cites any sources to support his claim.[18][19]
“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.
The one that irritates me is “the customer is always right…” How people can simply forget the rest baffles me.
I like to hit them with “If there are 2 bad cops, and 98 good cops who don’t turn the bad cops in. There are 100 bad cops”
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.
Wikipedia
Blood is thicker than water is a proverb in English meaning that familial bonds will always be stronger than other relationships. The oldest record of this saying can be traced back to the 12th century in German.[1]
Writing in the 1990s and 2000s, author Albert Jack[18] and Messianic minister Richard Pustelniak[19] claimed that the original meaning of the expression was that the ties between people who have made a blood covenant (or have shed blood together in battle) were stronger than ties formed by “the water of the womb”, thus “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb”. Neither of the authors cites any sources to support his claim.[18][19]
It especially irks me when the use it to infer the opposite of the quotes original meaning.