the.com/apple cart
The thing you upset when you're right but inconvenient.
means A settled, orderly state of affairs — most often heard as part of the phrase 'upset the apple cart,' meaning to wreck a plan or disrupt the smooth arrangement of things.
from The image comes from literal apple carts — the precariously stacked, wheeled barrows costermongers and farmers used to haul fruit to market. Stack the apples just right and the cart rolls along fine; one wrong bump and the whole load tumbles into the street. 'Upset the apple cart' turns that mundane disaster into a metaphor, and it's old enough to turn up in 18th-century English writing. The phrase stuck because the picture is so exact: a tidy, balanced system undone by a single jolt.
- origin
- 18th-century peddler carts, easily tipped and scattered
- idiom use
- always about disrupting a comfortable, fragile arrangement
- never singular
- nobody upsets one apple, only the whole cart