Originally posted by Derfel CadarnThat was pretty much what I had read.I still think of a sound fx when I say your nick. Like Pamela Anderson taking her bra off. 😵
In the books I took the name from he is Welsh, but I recently found out he was an Irish war hero turned monk.
Sometimes called Bedivere in the Arthur tales.
copy, paste, remove moronic bits, correct grammar, thank you michael quinlon whoever you are...
Shakespeare is first recorded as using [the phrase], in Macbeth: when Macduff hears that his family has been murdered, he says in disbelief:
All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?
The image that Shakespeare’s audience would have brought to mind at once was [that of] a falcon plummeting out of the sky to snatch its prey (like the kite for example [...]). You might guess that fell has something to do with fall, but it hasn’t. It [...] means something of terrible evil or deadly ferocity. We now [...] see it [mostly in] this fixed phrase ([...]occasionally in poetic use) but once it was a common word in its own right. One of its relatives is still about: felon, which comes from the same Old French source, fel, evil. Originally a felon was a cruel or wicked person; only later did the word evolve [in the US] to mean a person who commits a serious crime.
There are [...] four fell words in English; apart from this one, there is the verb meaning to cut down (intimately linked with fall), the one meaning an animal skin (as in the obsolete trade of fellmonger), and the one meaning a hill (as in the fells of Cumbria). They all come from different source words.