chickens come home to roost
1
8.4
- idiom
- Informal
:
el que siembra vientos, cosecha tempestades
- They thought they could avoid the consequences, but eventually, the chickens will come home to roost for all their reckless decisions.
And now the whole world is reaping the whirlwind as all those inflation chickens come home to roost.
- And now the whole world is reaping the whirlwind as all those inflation chickens come home to roost.
- I think also the, the, the a lot of New Labour chickens came home to roost.
Examples
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I think it we're seeing the the chickens come home to roost here as well.
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I think it we're seeing the the chickens come home to roost here as well.
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Well, now the chickens are coming home to roost as Ward Churchill would.
Blog text (7) -
His deceitful actions in the company have resulted in serious problems; now, the chickens come home to roost for him.
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After years of ignoring the warnings, she finally realized that the chickens have come home to roost when her mistakes caught up with her.
Synonyms
12
6.8
To have problems later because of something you did before
9
8.0
Bad actions or words cause trouble for the person who did them later
Surface Forms
Morphology
chickens + come + home + to + roost
The literal image of chickens returning to their roost is built from the constituent words, but the idiomatic sense that past bad actions will produce negative consequences requires a metaphorical, proverbial inference beyond the literal meanings. Although similar proverbs exist cross-linguistically, the moral/causal nuance ('bad consequences returning') is not fully predictable to a B1 learner who only knows the individual words.
Etymology
The saying chickens come home to roost may come from a simple farm picture: chickens wander in the day but always return at night to their sleeping place, the roost. So the phrase means that past bad actions will come back to 'cause trouble' for someone.