It has grown from a rotten root—striving to replace human judgment with detailed dictates.
Which to me, after the initial explosion of the Sex Pistols, always made rotten kind of boring.
Yeonmi had been hospitalized at the time for a stomach illness, likely from her diet of rotten potatoes.
Fittingly to that point, its rotten Tomato score (as of Tuesday evening) was a flat 50 percent.
They know this is a rotten deal and they are demoralized, running faster and faster with no hope of catching up.
Even the best of them were rotten to the core, and but mere adventurers.
There ain't a rotten knot in it from butt to finish, and mighty few of any other kind.
She was of about two hundred tons burthen, but must have-been old and rotten.
It sheared off heads so many, that it, and the ground it most polluted, were a rotten red.
But he took me to his own house for a glass of sherry and a biscuit, and there it wasn't so rotten.
c.1300, from a Scandinavian source akin to Old Norse rotinn "decayed," past participle of verb related to rotna "to decay," from Proto-Germanic stem *rut- (see rot (v.)). Sense of "corrupt" is from late 14c.; weakened sense of "bad" first recorded 1881. Rotten apple is from a saying traced back to at least 1528: "For one rotten apple lytell and lytell putrifieth an whole heape." The Rotten Row in London and elsewhere probably is from a different word, but of uncertain origin.
adjective
Deplorable; nasty; inept and bungled: This is a rotten situation altogether (1880+)