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.
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