Idiom
bad penny
Meaning
A person or thing which is unpleasant, disreputable, or otherwise unwanted, especially one which repeatedly appears at inopportune times.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“He always shows up like a bad penny when I am busy.”
“I thought I had seen the last of that salesman, but he turned up like a bad penny again today.”
“Just as the group finally achieved a sense of harmony, the disgraced former leader returned like a bad penny to disrupt their progress.”
Examples
simple
“He always shows up like a bad penny when I am busy.”
contextual
“I thought I had seen the last of that salesman, but he turned up like a bad penny again today.”
complex
“Just as the group finally achieved a sense of harmony, the disgraced former leader returned like a bad penny to disrupt their progress.”
Key words
Related idioms
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