Apparently it works for some people who hurl it at President Obama as if it were synonymous with un-American or at least dirty, rotten, bullish, boorish, you-name-it.
Mr. Leeds, the story goes, was said to be a drunkard, and the couple's devil child was, at the very least, just plain rotten.
Yet the Tories are blowing their chance.British hostility to immigration has roots in real concerns including over its possible effects on social cohesion and an asylum system that was, formerly at least, incompetent and rotten with fraud.
Once at the site, however, the warhorse heard the trumpets (or at least smelled the rotten bananas used as bait) and he shed 30 years, hopping joyfully across the rocks.
Not quite all – Chummy's copper hubby, he's OK; maybe a bit of a lapdog, but at least he's not rotten to the core like the rest of them.
A new study shows how seemingly good elephants turn rotten, at least from a human viewpoint, by stealing into farms and wolfing down crops.
However, and I believe Oprah would agree with me, there is a blemish on one of the newest members of the Apple family-the iPad which might make it rotten, at least psychologically.
But at least everyone knows things are rotten.
Because he was a foreign correspondent - for many years, Poland's only foreign correspondent - Kapuscinski seemed ubiquitous, at least when it came to rotten political structures in their moments of crumbling or catastrophe or dire bloodshed.
Even before this latest twist, the Bettencourt affair had a rotten air, not least because Mr Woerth remains in his job, as labour minister, in charge of the government's controversial pension-reform plans; some 60% of survey respondents do not think that he should still be in his post.
