In another thread, Hyla says: "If the whole world did this, we could dramatically curtail the problem of view inflation in one swell foop, and leave this place better for generations to come."

I couldn't help notice and laugh at his Spoonerism, as I said the exact same thing today. So here's the question: what exactly is a "fell swoop" and where does it come from?

I'm sure Hyla knew exeactly what he was doing! The term, "fell swoop" comes from an archaic meaning of "fell," that is, fierce or deadly. So, with one fatal blow, the board could be changed. Or is that one batal flow?

The New Fowler's Modern English Usage claims that this expression first appeared in Shakespeare's Macbeth. "Fell", sez Fowler, is archaic for "deadly" and "swoop", sez Fowler, is archaic for "swoop" -- as in a bird of prey diving on its victim. Fowler finally sez that the sense of danger which the phrase once carried has diluted with use such that it now means only "all at once" or "suddenly."

Shakespeare, Macbeth: Oh Hell-Kite! All? What, All my pretty Chickens, and their Damme At one fell swoope?

(actually, the original sense of swoop was a blow or stroke)

I will never forget TV shows about falconry, with the falcon retracting its wings almost totally, falling at quite a few mph, and its target, a pigeon, exploding into a cloud of feathers. A fell swoop indeed.

http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-fel1.htm
The above is a link on fell swoop provided by tsuwm in Feb 2002 as part of a thread started by stales.

My, I had no idea this thread was here. I was mostly just setting good ol' Ted up for another story, next time he toodles by...

I used to own a Toyota Tercel. The ads for it said it got its name from the fact that the male peregrine falcon is a third smaller than the female. (The female has to be larger, in order to be able to hunt even when laden with eggs.) I have not been able to find etymolgical confirmation of this, even though it sounds logical. The dictionaries say it came from belief that every third egg was a male.

I once had a fellow charged with driving straight through a stop sign, with not so much as a pause, testify before me. His story was that he had a peregrine falcon on his shoulder at the time. The bird had some sort of leather hat pulled down over its head, which was supposed to prevent it from seeing. According to the birder's testimony, the hood must have slipped, such that the bird could see, whereupon it latched onto his ear (at which point in the story he approached the bench to show me the notch in his ear) and would not let go. His attention was on anything but the stop sign through which he passed without slowing. The story was so fantastic that I believed it; fantastic stories often turn out to be true.

I finally found a site with falconry vocabulary. It confirmed definition of tercel meaning male a third smaller.
Words worth looking up: Bate, Bell, Bewit,Creance, Eyass, Feak, Haggard, Hood, Imp, Imprint, Jess, Mantle, Pellet, Sharp Set, Stoop, Tercel, Yarak

http://www.wingmasters.net/lofalconry.htm

Another word that seems a propos here is seel, used in falconry, meaning to sew the bird's eyes shut. Shakespeare used it metaphorically a number of times, as in this quote from Othello:

She that, so young, could give out such a seeming,
To seel her father's eyes up close as oak-- 

Apparently there's no semantic link with seal, although they are, to a degree, synonyms here. I'd say Father Steve's guy, with the leather hood, has the more humane approach. I'm relieved to hear he got off.

In the 1700's in England, ferrets' mouths would be sewn shut in order to employ them to flush rabbits our of their holes in order that they might be shot for food, while preventing the ferret from biting the rabbit and spoiling the meat.

I am traumatized.

Padre, how could the ferret eat then? I can't imagine they sewed and unsewed him everyday.

Slithy...why would they sew a falcon's eyes shut?

Cruelty--that's for sure, at least by our contemporary standards. Apparently the falcon's eyesight is so keen that it inhibits the establishing of a close relationship between the bird and its trainer. Here's a site that has more details:
http://www.arab-heritage.com/falconry.htm

An interesting bit of info I found while checking this out: the leather hood now used on the falcon is called a burgah, which is another form of burqa. Talk about being covered.

Dear belMarduk: A ferret was such a prized possession, you can be sure the sewing was temporary. My father once owned one, and earned a good bit of pocket money having his ferret flush rats out of barns, until some excited idiot stabbed it with a pitchfork.

The falconry site mentioned keeping hood constantly on very young falcon, until it got so tame it was not likely to just fly away and not return. Sewing the eyelids shut must have been quite a trick considering how crude their needles and threads must have been.

In googling I stumbled upon http://www.blackegg.com/1SwellFoop-backstage.html -- which matches only because "SwellFoop" is used only in the URL. Nonetheless, the spoonerism in the second paragraph is too exquisite not to mention.