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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I noticed that there was an eggcorn entry for “foul swoop” (fell to foul) but not for “fail swoop.” While not as frequent as “foul swoop”, “fail swoop” still gets nearly 10,000 hits when searched in google (9,590; “one fail swoop” gets 9,290), and I’ve noticed that I myself sometimes hesitate between “fell” and “fail” when the turn of phrase comes up.
Since “one fell swoop” is usually used in a negative manner – such as “in one fell swoop, I lost everything” – the use of “fail” indicates an interpretation that the phrase is intimately linked with the concept failing and failure: the reasoning goes, in one “fail swoop”, I “failed” to keep my money.
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I just heard “fail swoop” in the wild for the first time today, and jumped to the wonderful eggcorn database to see if it had been properly documented. So thanks for your post.
Here in northern Utah, the eggcorn has an additional justfication as the high eɪ vowel is often pronounced as É›. Thus, “Cabbage was on ‘sell’ at the grocery store.” And “I ‘felled’ my test last week.” So it’s impossible to tell the difference between “fell” and “fail” except in context, and if you are unfamiliar with a “fell swoop,” “fail swoop” does make a lot more sense.
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Yes! Phonetic justification!
Also, now that I think of it, it seems like it would also have additional justification in Southern American English, as well, where merging of lax & tense vowels before /l/ make fell/fail homophonous (at least for some of the South) – and it’s my intuition that the dipthongization of É› to É›jÉ™ would contribute to a confusion between fell/fail (but I’m not from, nor do I live in, the South (nor do I study Southern American English), so I don’t know what my intuitions are worth in this regard). So, instead of ‘fail’ sounding like ‘fell’ (as you say it does in northern Utah), in (parts of?) the South, ‘fell’ sounds like ‘fail’.
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As a denizen of western Georgia, I can tell you that your hunches are correct as to Southern Am. Eng. I recall once asking my mother as a boy why we have hail only to hear her give me some response from Scripture. Of course, I was asking about the falling balls of ice, not the abode of the damned, but to her ears the two are pronounced the same.
A funny result of this is that a number of southerners get confused about words most Americans never would. You’ve got about a 50-50 shot of hearing used car dealers overcorrect and try to sound proper by announcing a “going out of business sell.” Since they pronounce “sell” and “sale” the same way, they have trouble keeping straight in their minds which one deals with reduced prices and which one means vending wares.
But anyway – yes: most in these parts would pronounce “fell swoop” like “fail swoop.”
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Tannerpittman, you tattle-tell, er, tattle-tail. Uh, well, you know what I mean!..Giving away all us southerners’ secrets an’ sech. Shaym awn yew!
...did you ever marvel at the movie The Ten Commandments, beholding the curse where it did “hail fire and brimstone”, only to be thrown into a state of confusion pondering if the self-same characterization had something to do with the preacher’s sermon? That’s a bit of straightening-out you lucky yankees will never have to go through!
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Just to supplement booboo’s comment…
Hail, fire, and brimstone by RSL Contribute! 1 2006-09-01 18:01:14 by patschwieterman
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The words ‘dell’ and ‘dale’ mean about the same thing. I wonder if this is a case of the same process having occurred long ago.
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The dale/dell thing comes from a different cause—it goes back to a Germanic sound change called “i-mutation” that was taking place at very roughly the time English was becoming a language separate from other West Germanic languages. The OED traces both “dale” and “dell” back to a Germanic root *dalo-, but “dell” is from a derivative of that word—*dalja-. Due to “i-mutation,” that /j/ in *dalja- caused the /a/ to become an /e/. “Dale,” descending more directly from *dalo-, didn’t have to worry about that transformative /j/ and therefore kept its /a/. (English may have borrowed “dell” from Dutch after all this took place, and Old Norse “dalr” may have reinforced “dale,” but the story’s pretty much the same.)
Last edited by patschwieterman (2007-08-01 16:56:40)
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Googled; 936 hits; half or more are genuine. The rest are bad examples.
Regards,
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