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http://justinhartman.com/2007/05/07/is-david-bullard-an-utter-wanker/ -
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Crappy blog's never lasts long...the more crap, the greater the chance that people won't go back to it. This is the way the Internet cleans itself from stagnation and drivel.
If David thinks he should be the Blog-watchdog, then he is definately a wanker.
ard=shit
you - 'in one fowl swoop'
Bullard - In one fell swoop
Meaning
Suddenly; in a single action.
Origin
This is one of those phrases that we may have picked up early in our learning of the language and probably worked out its meaning from the context we heard it in, without any clear understanding of what each word meant. Most native English speakers could say what it means but, if we look at it out of context, it doesn't appear to make a great deal of sense. That lack of understanding of the words in the phrase is undoubtedly the reason that this is often misspelled - 'at one fail swoop' (or sometimes, stoop).
So, what's that 'fell'? We use the word in a variety of ways: to chop, as in fell a tree; a moorland or mountain, like those in the northern UK; the past tense of fall, as 'he fell over'. None of those seem to make sense in this phrase and indeed the 'fell' here is none of those. It's an old word, in use by the 13th century, that's now fallen out of use apart from in this phrase and as the common root of the term 'felon'. The Oxford English Dictionary defines fell as meaning 'fierce, savage; cruel, ruthless; dreadful, terrible', which is pretty unambiguous.
Shakespeare either coined the phrase, or gave it circulation, in Macbeth, 1605:
MACDUFF: [on hearing that his family and servants have all been killed]
All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?
This whole shebang reminds me of the NY Times cartoon:
Two dogs talking to each other: Dog 1 says -
I used to have a blog, but I decided to just go back to pointless, incessant barking.
WOOOOOOF!!
Usually I love reading Bullard's very cynical topics in the Sunday Times, but I must confess I thought he was having an off day!
Could his article be based on the fact that the Sunday Times has published a myriad of articles on blogging in the last two months?
More prominently, most of the articles in the last two months have all been pointing to the decline in blogging. The Sunday Times also focussed on Hollywood and celebs blogging - perhaps this is the dilemma! Professional bloggers with relevant, up to date blogs are being compared to the lousy, glitzy failure blogs of Hollywood and as Dave would put it - wannebe journalists!
Not fair and very biased!