stink to high heaven

Verb

stink to high heaven (third-person singular simple present stinks to high heaven, present participle stinking to high heaven, simple past stank to high heaven or stunk to high heaven, past participle stunk to high heaven)

1. (derogatory, slang) To have a very strong and unpleasant smell.
   • He could stand snakes, but alligators he disliked. It was the way they dragged their victims underneath the water and buried them, waiting until the corpse became rotten. That was the way they liked their meat—stinking to high heaven. The thought of such a death filled him with dread.1975, Donald Goines, chapter I, in Swamp Man, Los Angeles, Calif.: Holloway House Publishing Company, published 2005, →ISBN, page 12
   • Pill-popping rocker Elvis Presley was so hooked on drugs he refused to bathe for months on end, he often wet his pants – and he stunk to high heaven!1989 December 19, “Elvis stunk to high heaven & even wet his pants!: New shocker in blockbuster book”, in Eddie Clontz, editor, Weekly World News, volume 11, number 11, Lantana, Fla.: Weekly World...

   Synonyms:

   reek, funk, honk, hum, niff, pong, smell, stink, whiff

2. (derogatory, figuratively, slang) Of a person or situation: to be highly ethically dubious; also, of a person: to be very incompetent.
   • Was it not that I was nauseated by our richest men? By the convicts of riches, who pick up their advantage out of any rubbish, with cold eyes, lewd thoughts; by this rabble that stinks to high heaven; by this gilded, false mob whose fathers have been pickpockets or carrion birds or ragpickers— [...]1954, Friedrich Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Fourth and Last Part [The Voluntary Beggar]”, in Walter Kaufmann, transl., The Portable Nietzsche: […] (The Viking Portable Library; 64), New York...
   • "Good God, what nonsense!" Rusanov spat the words out, with a hiss. "It's time someone changed the record. What a moral! It stinks to high heaven, it's quite alien to us. What does it say there that men live by?"1969 February, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “What Men Live By”, in Nicholas Bethell, David Burg, transl., Cancer Ward: Translated from the Russian, New York, N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, →OCLC...