bad in the sense of worthless: good for nothing, and unable to stand being looked at
Greek had more than one word for bad, and this one comes at badness from the side of worth. Its older use covered the cheap, the slight, and the poorly made: goods nobody would pay much for, work nobody would boast about. By the time of the New Testament that judgment of quality had become a judgment of character, so it describes conduct that is good for nothing, that yields nothing worth having, and that will not survive a close look.
That angle is what separates it from its neighbors. The common word for bad (κακός) pictures harm and damage; the harsher one (πονηρός) pictures active mischief and a will bent on it; this one pictures uselessness and rot, close to the word used for a rotten tree that cannot produce good fruit (σαπρός).
All six New Testament uses turn it into a noun, "the bad thing" or "bad things", and they land in three settings:
- the losing half of a plain good-or-bad sorting of what a person has done
- conduct so foul in itself that it keeps away from the light, because being seen would finish it
- the discreditable thing an opponent would love to be able to say about you
In every one of them it is deeds, practices, or reports that are called bad, never a person.