Explaining ‘fell’ in one fell swoop

For years I’ve been reading the phrase at/in one fell swoop, and even using it occasionally, without ever examining it closely. I knew what it meant (“all at once”), and that it came from Shakespeare, but only recently did I stop and wonder: What’s that fell doing there?

It begins, as far as we know, with Macbeth. In Act 4, Scene 3, Macduff finds out (spoiler warning) that his family has been murdered, and he says:

He has no children. All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?

The image of a kite from hell swooping to kill defenceless chooks gives the sense of a sudden, fierce, merciless assault: this much is self-evident; the use of fell is more obscure.

Fell as an adjective has had several meanings over the centuries, most of them now obsolete or restricted to poetic, rhetorical, dialectal and idiomatic contexts. The oldest adjectival sense dates from the late 13th century: “fierce, cruel, ruthless; terrible, destructive”, according to the OED. Thus did Shakespeare use it.

This fell came from Old French fel, from Middle Latin fello “villain, traitor”. Its history overlaps with that of felon – once “wicked person” – and of felo de se “suicide”. Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary connects it to Celtic tongues, for example Irish feall “betray, deceive” and Breton falloni “treachery”.

Over time, at one fell swoop softened and came to mean simply “all at once” or “in a single go” – that is, the connotations of viciousness and calamity faded. MWDEU says the idiom is now “neutral in application”. We can do the housework, empty the dessert bowl, X all the Y at one fell swoop.

Variations have multiplied. Fell swoop becomes foul swoop, fowl swoop, fell stoop, fell stroke, full swoop, fail swoop, and so on. The meaning remains the same, more or less, but you might want to be careful of the variant adjectives unless your intent is to play or pun on the original. The preposition at is often in and sometimes with; indeed, a definite switch from at to in appears to be under way:

The trend is supported by data from the Corpus of Historical American English. You can click on the following graphs to see how the respective phrases have been used.

at one fell swoop:

in one fell swoop:

Some critics consider at one fell swoop a cliché. Like any set expression, though, it can be deployed to good effect when its particular sound and style suit your needs.

Graeme Donald, in The Dictionary of Modern Phrase, says it “properly applies to the sudden, savage attack of a bird of prey when it goes into its stoop”. But not even Shakespeare used it that way: it has been metaphorical since birth.

Note: This post also appears on the Visual Thesaurus. Subscription required until three months have elapsed.

Starved with the cold, and linguistic inflation

I have two new posts up at Macmillan Dictionary Blog. The first, Starved with the cold, looks at how this expression (which has currency in Ireland) illustrates the phenomenon of semantic narrowing. This is where a word’s meaning narrows to a more specific domain:

Starve is descended from the Old English word steorfan, meaning die – without implicit reference to the means of death . . . . The story of starve illustrates a common semantic process – known as narrowing, restriction, or specialisation – whereby a word’s field of reference contracts. For example, accident used to mean any occurrence, before it took on the more restricted sense of something that happens by chance, then something unfortunate that happens by chance: happening to happenstance to mishap. (Sometimes the different senses exist in parallel.) In the 20th century, accident gained a still narrower meaning: a child whose conception was not planned.

Other words that have undergone narrowing include undertaker, deer, girl, affection, engine, science, and meat, all of which appear in the post.

*

Is linguistic inflation insanely awesome? seems to have struck a chord, maybe because the practice is, well, unbelievably popular at the moment. Here’s an excerpt:

Inflation lies behind the popular use of such words as genius, epic, awesome, totally, and incredible. What they mean is often more modest than their traditional senses suggest: genius means clever, epic is impressive, incredible is surprising. Such is our need to imbue our words with force and significance, that we use hyperbole to entice people to pay attention . . . . Numbers offer a convenient way to observe the scale of this phenomenon. Take the phrase “give 110%”, which is common in sporting and business contexts. Once it became a cliché, people started feeling they had to give 200% or 1000% or even 10,000% . . .

Anthony Burgess thought inflation was a debasement of language, but I think his fears were a bit exaggerated. You can read the rest of the post to find out why, and to see some incredibly epic examples of linguistic inflation.

My older posts are in the Macmillan Dictionary Blog archive.

Squishy vs. squidgy

I got to wondering recently about the semantic differences between squishy and squidgy.

For me, squishy is soft and yielding, squishable like a sponge; squidgy refers to something a bit firmer and more malleable, like marla.* Their internal consonant clusters, voiceless -sh- vs. voiced -dg-, reflect this distinction — as with slush vs. sludge.

Curious about how others contrast them, and why, I asked offhand on Twitter, and was gratified by the range and detail of responses. I hadn’t thought much about the words’ emotional connotations: these and other qualities (e.g., relative wetness) recurred in the replies.

The discussion is now up on Storify for convenient reading and reference: ‘Squishy’ vs. ‘squidgy’.

Additional thoughts here or on Twitter would be welcome.

Edit: A recent tweet from @OxfordWords led me to their definition of squeegee, which says its origin is “from archaic squeege ‘to press’, strengthened form of squeeze.” Which seems relevant.

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* /’mɔːrlə/ An Irish word for plasticine or modelling clay.

‘Nice’ in Northanger Abbey

Oh! it is a very nice word indeed! – It does for everything. (Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey)

Nice is often held up as an example of semantic drift: its meaning has changed often, and radically, since it entered English in the 13thC from Old French nice “simple, silly, foolish”, from Latin nescius “ignorant”.

Etymonline sketches the sequence, while the Shorter OED’s entry is shown in plain form here with quotations for each sense. The 14th and final adjectival sense in the OED, dating from the early 18thC, is the general-purpose expression of approval we’re most familiar with:

Agreeable, pleasant, satisfactory, delightful, generally commendable; (of food) tasty, appetizing; (of a person) kind, considerate, friendly; iron. (very) bad, unsatisfactory. colloq.

This usage has long been criticised for being vague, overused, and colloquial. Partridge, in Usage and Abusage, called it “an indication of laziness”, while Fowler blamed the word’s own good fortune, and women, for ruining it: “the ladies”, he wrote, had “charmed out of it all its individuality & converted it into a mere diffuser of vague & mild agreeableness.” Woe is mankind!

Nowadays, nice is used mostly in speech and fiction, as the following at-a-glance genre graph in COCA (1990–2011) shows. You can click through for examples in each category.

Comparatively few instances of the word are found in academic texts, and many of these are acronymic or dialogue uses.

Fowler said people limiting nice to its “more proper” (i.e., older) senses were doing the language a favour. He would presumably have sided with Henry Tilney in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817), who teased Catherine Morland over her modern-leaning use of the word:

   ‘But now really, do not you think Udolpho the nicest book in the world?’
   ‘The nicest; – by which I suppose you mean the neatest. That must depend upon the binding.’
   ‘Henry,’ said Miss Tilney, ‘you are very impertinent. Miss Morland, he is treating you exactly as he does his sister. He is for ever finding fault with me, for some incorrectness of language, and now he is taking the same liberty with you. The word “nicest,” as you used it, did not suit him; and you had better change it as soon as you can, or we shall be overpowered with Johnson and Blair all the rest of the way.’
   ‘I am sure,’ cried Catherine, ‘I did not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should not I call it so?’
   ‘Very true,’ said Henry, ‘and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! it is a very nice word indeed! – It does for everything. Originally perhaps it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement; – people were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word.’
   ‘While, in fact,’ cried his sister, ‘it ought only to be applied to you, without any commendation at all. You are more nice than wise. Come, Miss Morland, let us leave him to meditate over our faults in the utmost propriety of diction, while we praise Udolpho in whatever terms we like best.’

The passage plays astutely on the word’s polysemy, while the reference to Johnson is, well, a nice coincidence. Today I saw a page of Isaac Watts’s Logick which Johnson had marked up to quote in his Dictionary: “Nor have we either Senſes or Inſtruments ſufficiently nice and accurate to find them out.” The word nice, exemplifying one of the usages of which Fowler later approved, was duly underlined.

A grisly crash blossom

What would you do to escape prosecution?

Crash blossoms, as you may know, are headlines that can lead you up the garden path, semantically speaking.

Today’s Irish Times has a mild one. The word to, commonly used in headlines to indicate futurity (as in the example above), here inadvertently generates an alternative meaning in which the Dutch TV presenters ate human flesh in order to escape prosecution.

It’s a wild idea.

The headline is unlikely to be misunderstood, but it has the potential to cause a momentary miscue — replacing to with will would avoid it — and it is grammatically interesting.

There are more crash blossoms here, at Language Log (including the recent gem “Does Donald Trump support matter?”), and on the Crash Blossoms blog.

You might could dig these multiple modals

A passage from Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress:

Joppy stopped wiping [the bar] for a moment and looked me in the eye.
“Don’t get me wrong, Ease. DeWitt is a tough man, and he runs in bad company. But you still might could get that mortgage payment an’ you might even learn sumpin’ from’im.”

That “might could get” was a serendipitous phrase to encounter. Over the preceding days I had come across several web pages on what are known as double modals or multiple modals, and had been considering a blog post about them. Hint taken.

First, a technical note on modals. These are a small and grammatically unusual family of verbs. They’re a subset of the auxiliary (helper) verbs and so are sometimes called modal auxiliaries. They qualify other verbs in a verb phrase, influencing the overall meaning: I can go, you may be, she must try. Geoffrey Pullum says there are 8–12 of them in English:

Memory of syntax and semantics

Jean Aitchison’s The Articulate Mammal describes and evaluates many interesting psycholinguistic experiments, one of which I want to draw attention to here:

a number of psychologists have found that all memory of syntax and vocabulary normally fades very fast indeed, unless subjects are specifically told that they will be asked to recall the sentence. Memory for syntax of any kind is near to chance approximately half a minute after a sentence has been spoken (Sachs 1967). In normal circumstances, it seems, people remember only the gist of what has been said, and they often confuse this with a number of extra beliefs and expectations about the topic under discussion (Fillenbaum 1973).

Jacqueline Strunk Sachs, speaking subsequently (PDF) about her experiment, said it showed that we forget “the specific wording of an utterance . . . within seconds”, though we might retain its meaning for a very long time.

Her 1967 paper (“Recognition memory for syntactic and semantic aspects of connected discourse”) was based on her doctoral dissertation and can be downloaded here.* It’s a short and clear account of a smartly designed study, well worth reading if you’re into this sort of thing and you don’t mind the Chomskyan terminology.

The abstract concludes:

The results suggest that the original form of the sentence is stored only for the short time necessary for comprehension to occur. When a semantic interpretation has been made, the meaning is stored. Thus the memory of the meaning is not dependent on memory of the original form of the sentence.

I imagine this rings true for most people. What say you? Have you noticed the rapid divergence between memory of what is said and memory of exactly how it is said?
 

* Typo fans will enjoy SpringerLink’s mangled paper title, “Recopition memory”, and the suggestion that some of the data were presented at a meeting held in April, 1066.