It had a dying fall

Sue de Groot is in a froth over fowls, fools and felons

Shakespeare may have been a rum fellow in tights with a bad haircut, but he gave us words we use every day without credit or acknowledgement. In fact, mostly without even realising that we're quoting him. Dead as a doornail. Pure as the driven snow. Fit for the gods. A foregone conclusion. All Shakespeare.

Imagine if he were still around and earned verbal royalties. He could buy the world and turn it into a theatre called The Globe.

Right this second, there is almost certainly an acne-ridden teenager muttering, "Out, damned spot" at the mirror, oblivious to the fact that Lady Macbeth said it first in around 1606.

From the same play we get "one fell swoop". Here, alas, most people have not only forgotten who coined the phrase; they've probably made Will's 400-year-old corpse wriggle out of its decayed stockings by mercilessly abusing his words.

They were spoken by the unfortunate Macduff when told that Macbeth had slaughtered his wife and children: "What, all my pretty chickens, and their dam, at one fell swoop?"

The modern-day massacre of one fell swoop upsets me almost as much. "Fell" in this sense has fallen into disuse. Today it makes us think of defenestration or lumberjacks, but in Will's day it was commonly used as a substitute for cruel, malignant or vicious.

Fell came from the same root as "felon", which we still understand to be a wicked evildoer. Perhaps heartless felons are responsible for the felonious atrocity: "one foul swoop".

As distressing as this misuse is, it is understandable. "Foul" - meaning bad and horrible - has wider currency than "fell" in our world. But it's still wrong.

It's not only fell that gets perverted. I've heard people say "stoop" instead of swoop. Like foul, this is also not too far wrong. If you've ever heard a falconer hold forth, he might have told you that the proper term for a bird of prey's dive is a stoop. And here I thought it was the English translation of the Dutch word for patio: "never keep your chickens on one fowl stoop or a greedy hawk may get them all at one fell swoop." Anyway, it's still wrong.

The context of the phrase has also veered off course. It is employed to describe a sudden event instead of a savage cataclysm. "The half-priced shoes disappeared from the shelf at one fell swoop" hardly compares to the pain of poor Macduff losing his kids. "All of a sudden" would be far more appropriate for the shoes. And guess who first said that? Yup, Will again.

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