Part 15: The Chickens Have Come Home to Roost
The idiom "chickens have come home to roost" has several meanings.
The first is much like the Hindu and Buddhist concept of karma: what goes around comes around. It means that the bad things you do or say to others may come back to haunt you one day.
The second is that our actions today may have consequences in the future or that the problems we are experiencing today are a consequence of our past actions.
Here are a few examples:
(1) "I did not take my studies seriously, so I have failed two papers. The chickens have come home to roost."
(2) "Peter is hurting people's feelings. He doesn't realize that one day the chickens will come home to roost."
(3) "After years of borrowing, the government's chickens have come to roost. It's spending 70% of its revenue on debt repayment, so it does not have money left to pay suppliers."
The earliest known written use of the idiom is in The Parson's Tale, A 1390 treatise by Geoffrey Chaucer.
One line of the treatise says, "And ofte tyme swich cursynge wrongfully retorneth agayn to hym that curseth, as a bryd that retorneth agayn to his owene nest." In today's English, this would mean, "Curses are like birds. They always return to their nest at nightfall."
The first time the word "chicken" was used in this context was in The Curse of Kehama, an 1810 poem by Robert Southey.
One of the lines in the poem says, "Curses are like young chicken: they always come home to roost." The general theme of the poem is the value of never doing to others what you would not like them to do to you.
