The Sun, reviewing a new laptop from Huawei, mentioned a combined fingerprint sensor and on-switch that lets users ‘power up and log in in one fell swoop’.
Logging-in is not usually a fell act, but one fell swoop has long been a cliché, rather than a quotation from Macbeth, where Macduff, on hearing of their murder, asks: ‘What, all my pretty chickens and their dam / At one fell swoop?’
The phrase at one swoop was in the Jacobean air, for Webster in his White Devil has Lodovico declare: ‘Fortune’s a right whore. / If she give ought, she deales it in small parcels, / That she may take away all at one swope.’
Fell has four main meanings, three of them found in Macbeth: ‘terrible’, as here; ‘has fallen’ (‘The victory fell on us’); and ‘pelt’ (‘My fell of hair / Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir’).
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