|
Reader question: Please explain this sentence: “We just got our head handed to us by a very good team that played very good on their home floor.” Got our head handed to us? What does that mean? My comments: The speaker means to say that his team suffered a bad defeat, an embarrassing one in which they were thoroughly outplayed by the home team. Literally, they all got beheaded because only after that could someone hand their head, or rather heads back to them. The speaker means what he says metaphorically, of course. If he were decapitated, he wouldn’t be able to talk but anyways, to say you’ve got your head handed to you is one way of saying that you suffered a total defeat, either in battle, a game, a political debate or any other competition. It’s the same to say you’ve got killed by the opposition – that, too, will give a feeling of how thorough and complete the loss (and your subsequent suffering) is. It’s the same as to say that you’ve got clobbered, trounced, destroyed, slaughtered – all actual expressions sportswriters use to describe a one-sided contest, in which the loser had no chance. To use a similar expression, you’ve got your rear end kicked and that is that. Anyway, to get one’s head handed to one is an expression which may find its way all the way back to the story of the beheading of Saint John the Baptist, in a biblical revenge saga. Wikipedia explains: | 
