In One Fowl Swoop

The Two Ronnies were the mainstay of my Saturday evening viewing when I was a child. These comedians had such a way with language. Their wordplay tickled my brain in all the right ways.

Puns, mondegreens and malapropisms can be used so creatively. Today was the day I learned of another category of such wordplay, 'eggcorns'. They tend to happen when people aren't familiar with a word in a phrase, and substitute a different word that almost makes sense. A person might mishear Alzheimer's Disease as 'Old Timers Disease'. The image above shows 'one fowl swoop'. The original phrase is 'in one fell swoop', but people unfamiliar with 'fell' (unsparing, grim, fierce, ruthless) have replaced with with 'foul', which makes a great deal of sense, and 'fowl', which doesn't.

Professor Mark Liberman was discussing the example of a woman who used 'egg corn' instead of 'acorn'. He noted this specific type of substitution lacked a name. A fellow linguist suggested using 'egg corn' itself as a label. Over time this morphed into 'eggcorn'.

Of all of the examples given, there was only one that I have used, 'to the manor born'. The correct term is 'to the manner born', a line from Hamlet. In my defense, I have not read Hamlet, and there was a television program in the early 1980s called 'To the Manor Born'.

The one I plan on using is 'in one fowl swoop', but it will involve  a chicken doing something rather foul. If I can make the chicken evil enough, it might even be 'fell'.