Heads will roll

Sunday, 2022-9-18: Phrase: Heads will roll
Someone will be punished.

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Phrase: Heads will roll

There is no doubt about it.

The phrase heads will roll sounds quite gruesome when you think about it.

I become nostalgic when I hear it, though.

During my childhood, when the five of us kids all got going creating castles with sofa cushions or playing wargames inside on a dreary winter day with Nerf guns, it would quickly become too much for my mother to handle.

When that happened, she immediately went nuclear, threatening that heads will roll when our father got home.


The phrase heads will roll means someone will be punished for what they have done. Often, it’s used to mean someone will lose their job.


You see, father came home like a hurricane every day.

When we heard the car in the driveway, we would scatter like leaves in the November wind.

My mother’s nuclear option to regain control of her children was to threaten to tell their father.

Back then, my father was about 90kg of solid muscle with the hair-trigger of a wolverine.

He never hit us, but for an eight-year-old kid, he was a terrifying guy when he came home at the end of the day dirty, stinky and NOT a happy camper.

I’m smiling as I write this now, but it was not funny then.

We had visions of five little heads on fenceposts in front of the house when mom threatened that heads will roll if we didn’t get our acts together and clean up the living room ‘befer yer fa’der gets ‘ome.’ 

Can you imagine how the French felt during the revolution when Madame Guillotine’s thirst for blood was never quenched?

Many mothers try to put the fear of God into their children.

My mother put the fear of Dad into us because we knew if she told him what we had gotten up to, heads will roll.  


Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test

This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).   

On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 75.   

The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100. 



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