Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Hi All,
I often hear the term “One foul (instead of “fell”) swoop” used – especially by sportimg commentators – it still more or less makes sense. Does this qualify as an eggcorn?
David Marshall
Brisbane
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It’s near enough to an eggcorn, but substituting a present word for an archaic one. The etymologies of ‘foul’ and ‘fell’ are slightly different. Many eggcorns seem to be such a substitution, where the archaic word has ceased to make sense to anybody in common language.
Etymologies are:
fell (adj.) c.1275, from O.Fr. fel “cruel, fierce,” from M.L. fello “villain” (see felon). Phrase at one fell swoop is from “Macbeth.”
foul (adj.) O.E. ful “dirty, stinking, vile, corrupt,” from P.Gmc. *fulaz (cf. O.H.G. fül, M.Du. voul, Ger. faul, Goth. füls), from base *fu-, corresponding to PIE *pu-, perhaps from the sound made in reaction to smelling something bad (cf. Skt. puyati “rots, stinks,” putih “foul, rotten;” Gk. puon “discharge from a sore;” L. pus “putrid matter,” putere “to stink,” putridus “rotten;” Lith. puviu “to rot”).
So, what’s that ‘fell’? We use the word in a variety of ways: to chop, as in fell a tree; a moorland or mountain, like those in the northern UK; the past tense of fall, as ‘he fell over’. None of those seem to make sense in this phrase. The ‘fell’ here is none of those. This ‘fell’ comes from an Old French word ‘fel’, from which we also get ‘felon’, a person guilty of a major crime. The Oxford English Dictionary defines fell as meaning ‘fierce, savage; cruel, ruthless; dreadful, terrible’, which is pretty unambiguous.
Shakespeare either coined the phrase, or gave it circulation, in Macbeth, 1605:
MACDUFF: [on hearing that his family and servants have all been killed]
All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their damme
At one fell swoope?
The kite referred to is a hunting bird, like the Red Kite, which was common in England in Tudor times and is now making a welcome return after near extinction in the 20th century. The swoop (or stoop as is now said) is the rapid descent made by the bird when capturing prey.
Shakespeare used the imagery of a hunting bird’s ‘fell swoop’ to indicate the ruthless and deadly attack by Macbeth’s agents.
Swoop is a variant of the Old English word that gives us the modern word sweep.
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It’s already in the database. You can use the search option to locate it.
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