Seeing only the faults or bad side. This term is based on the old belief that to a person suffering from jaundice (a condition in which the skin and whites of the eyes turn yellow), everything looks yellow. John Webster put it into so many words in The White Devil (1.2): “They that have the yellow jaundice think all objects they look on to be yellow” (1612). The expression long survived the belief and was a cliché by 1800 or so.