Chickens coming home to roost

The complete expression is, ‘curses are like young chickens, they always come home to roost’ and there is evidence to suggest that the simile between curses rebounding and birds coming home to roost or returning to the nest is very old. Some say it was known to Roman writers like Terence (c. 190-159 BC). Chaucer in The Parson’s Tale (c.1387) tells of curses that are like ‘birds returning to their own nests’. The current form of the expression using the plural chickens, is attributed to Robert Southey The Curse of Kehama (1810). Since then, the ‘curses’ part of the expression seems to have fallen away and sometimes even the chickens are dispensed with. Punch Magazine in 1919, for example, is not afraid to mix metaphors and writes of wild oats coming home to roost. The original meaning, however, remains intact in that misdeeds and mistakes often rebound with adverse effects.