wormeaten

If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall!

The Pope's visit to Africa and the Western media Dymphna 2009

If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall!

Archive 2009-03-01 Dymphna 2009

Having the main bad guy, God Almightly, turn out to be a drooling idiot in a coffin who dies when he is dropped is not merely silly, it is pathetic: the writing of someone so wormeaten by hate that he cannot even present the object of his hatred as worthy of any dramatic tension or conflict with the hero.

Double Smackdowns: Wright on Pullman & Synaesthete7 on The Susan Thing Mirtika 2006

I said this to myself; but now another summer is gone, and another, and another, and I am obliged to say to you, Reader, that the seeds which I planted, if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues, were wormeaten or had lost their vitality, and so did not come up.

Walden 2004

The most effective cure is to remove the wormeaten plank and replace with a new plank.

Chapter 8 1983

Lucerne with the gloomy figures of the Dance of Death painted along its wormeaten sides, while over its old timbers rolls the current of busy life, and the laughter of children echoes from its roof.

Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 Various

Also the dry tree and the white lily: the dry tree betokeneth thy brother Lionel, which is dry without virtue, and therefore many men ought to call him the rotten tree, and the wormeaten tree, for he is a murderer and doth contrary to the order of knighthood.

Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) Thomas Malory Jean Froissart

And he had another vision: him thought that he came to a great place which seemed a chapel, and there he found a chair set on the left side, which was wormeaten and feeble.

Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) Thomas Malory Jean Froissart

He considered a grate-bar from a heating furnace, and then he found the poleax, lying among a pile of wormeaten boards.

Police Operation H. Beam Piper 1934

Also the dry tree and the white lily: the dry tree betokeneth thy brother Lionel, which is dry without virtue, and therefore many men ought to call him the rotten tree, and the wormeaten tree, for he is a murderer and doth contrary to the order of knighthood.

Chapter XIII. The Sixteenth Book. Of the Holy Communication of an Abbot to Sir Bors, and How the Abbot Counselled Him 1909