Abstract
The article deals with the actual usage of the Anglo-American proverb The bad apple spoils the whole <entire> barrel <bushel; bunch> (also known as The rotten apple injures its neighbor) in contemporary American English. Apart from the proverb, the article considers the separate use of its nominal part, bad/rotten apples, as a separate idiom in its own right. Emphasis is put on the semantic and pragmatic shift that occurs when the idiom is used with quantifiers (e.g. a few) and appears to juxtapose the idiom and the proverb in contemporary American political discourse, especially the one connected to the BLM movement.
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