Fixin’ to…

  In our sixth “Talking Southern” column, published back in early January 2025, your compiler wrote briefly on the tendency of Southerners to say they’re “fixin’ to” do something.  But after having been laughed at recently by an especially condescending Yankee type for using the phrase, your compiler wants to trot the topic out and cover it in more detail in an effort to suppress the falsely superior ignorance-parading-as-sophistication some folks display, which sometimes inserts itself uninvited into our lives.

     Let us begin by taking the word, “fix.”  Usually a verb but sometimes a noun, it is quite a versatile word, the meaning of which can range from  repair and mending to securing and fastening.  From arranging and settling to preparing or making ready.  For directing one’s focus or spaying one’s pet.  For determining a vessel’s position, for illegally influencing an outcome, or for an addict’s compulsive need.  But for our purposes for this discussion, there are only two uses we need to focus on, and these are relatively easy to remember because they rhyme:   “Fix” means either to repair or to prepare – or if one wishes to emphasize the rhyme, to RE-pair or to PRE-pare.

     We all understand its usage in a sense of making repairs, and most of us use the word that way frequently.   But your compiler suspects that English speakers the world over use the word in its “prepare” sense all the time without really realizing it.  Some of the more troglodytic of these users will actually laugh at Southerners for using it in the same way, but in a different context. 

     What your compiler means is this:  nearly everyone will say he or she is going to fix breakfast or lunch, probably without realizing either that they’re saying it, or that they’re not RE-pairing the repast, but rather PRE-paring it  So if a body can prepare, or fix, a meal, then whey can’t a body be preparing, or fixing, to do virtually anything else?  There’s no reason on earth why not, and let no supercilious Yankee try to convince you otherwise.  

   “Fix” means to repair or prepare, and when one of us says he is fixin’ to do something, he is speaking perfectly proper English and using grammar beyond reproach in communicating that he is preparing to do something.   Thus, should you insult one of us by commenting adversely on our usage of the phrase, you might be fixin’ to come a cropper, as the Brits say. Or to put it into more American terms, you might be cruisin’ for a bruisin’.

     Now that your compiler (who will never be named Poet Laureate of anywhere) has that off his chest, he will close with a simple reminder to those who would impugn our manner of speech – a couplet of his own poetic creation:

                                       Don’t quarrel with us for saying “fixin’.”

                                       It might result in your unmixin’.