This week we had a team meeting in the office for 3 solid days. When your work environment promotes A.D.D and you are forced to sit still without distraction and provide active listening / presentations for 3 solid days, this is a true test of fortitude.
Today I was able to provide a delivery overview of our quarterly functionality being put into production this weekend. This is tech speak for saying today rocked professionally. I got to hang with my team (who are amazing people I truly enjoy), host an interactive presentation that highlighted our efforts being made realities, and feel accomplished all in one fell swoop.
As I say "one fell swoop" I question where the phrase came from. So I looked it up.
Fell is an old English word meaning awful or terrible. As in felon, which now means you've been convicted of a crime but used to mean simply you were a bad person. Swoop is Batmanesque - onomatopoeia. So really one fell swoop is a wham, bam, bite me ma'am event of bad luck swooping in and bopping you on the head. It's come to mean "all at once" but started off much more dire.
Shakespeare used it in Macbeth - the first recorded instance of this phrase. Shakespeare, by the way, was so amazing at re-forming the English language, that Samuel Johnson's dictionary (the first book of its kind) quotes him more than any other author. Here are a few of his catchphrases. This fascinates me to no end. We are quoting Shakespeare constantly without even being aware of it. Sly Will.
And just like that...two fell swoops. My work here is done.
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