Your English: Phrasal verbs: fall

If you enter fell for into an internet search engine, the chances are it will come up with some very interesting examples. A quick search on the world's most widely used search engine produced, amongst others, "I fell for Borat" and "I fell for an email scam". In both cases, fall for has the meaning of 'to be tricked into believing something that is not true'. In the first example, the speaker was fooled into believing the spoof character Borat (from the film of the same name) was real, and in the second the speaker was defrauded by one of the many email fraudsters offering to pay you for the privilege of transferring money into your bank account.

The same search produced "Carla Bruni fell for Nicolas Sarkozy because of his six brains" and a travel writer saying how she fell for Egypt. Here the speakers were not duped or defrauded, but the first fell in love with a person and the second was captivated by Egypt respectively.

If you don't have access to the internet, you could always fall back on a conventional dictionary (resort to something that is perhaps less sophisticated but nonetheless reliable). Anyway, too much time spent on the internet might cause you to fall out with your husband, wife, partner or friends (have a big argument with them), your plans might then fall through (fail to materialize) and that might cause your whole world to fall apart (break into little pieces). And all because you fell for the advice at the beginning of this article.