Englishpay the piper
Meaning: To pay for one's mistakes; to live with the consequences of one's (wrong) actions.
Example: “He partied all semester, and now it's time to pay the piper.”
Origin: Frequently confused with the separate proverb that whoever pays the piper calls the tune, which makes a quite different point about funding buying control. The consequence sense of this phrase draws instead on the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, in which a town hires a piper to rid it of rats, watches him succeed, then refuses to pay — whereupon he uses the same pipe to lead away its children. The story attaches to a real and unexplained entry in Hamelin's records of children lost in 1284, and it reached a wide modern audience through the Brothers Grimm and Robert Browning's poem of 1842. What the idiom preserves is the shape of the tale: the debt does not disappear when it is refused, it is collected later and on terms the debtor does not set.
More English idioms
- play one's cards right To do all the right things and make all the right moves in order to achieve some end.
- play second fiddle To be in a subordinate position; to have a lower rank or standing than someone else.
- pop the question To ask someone to get married.
- pound of flesh A (figuratively) painful payment of a debt.
- pull oneself up by one's bootstraps To improve oneself (usually economically) without help from others.
- pull rank To take advantage of one's superior position (one's rank).
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Words that look familiar in another language but mean something else entirely.
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