Repair:
repaired; repairing; repairs
intransitive verb
- : to betake oneself : GO
repaired to the judge’s chambers- : to come together : RALLY
- obsolete : RETURN [Merriam-Webster]
English words belong to several categories, depending on the attribute of interest. In this case, I’m focusing on meaning or definition(s), and the categories available include single-meaning, disparate, and opposites; there are others, obviously, although, to digress a trifle, I’ve noticed that the public vernacular has begun blurring out the implication that includes means the following list is not complete. A pity, as it results in ambiguous communications and fairly gauche sentences.
I must admit to a certain interest in words which fall into the disparate category, and repair is one such. We all know its sometime synonym, fix or to fix[1], but how often do we use repair in the above sense? That disparity in definitions intrigues me, as there may be a hidden connection between fixing and betaking oneself, and that connection might lead to insights into how people 500 years ago viewed the world. Words, after all, reflect our views of reality with an intensity rivaled only by art; and some compositions of words achieve the level of art.
Such are my preoccupations. Merry Christmas!
1 Whichever is right; the finer points of transgressive verbs are lost on me, although a few years back I finally grokked that dangling participles are bad because they make the point of a sentence ambiguous, which may be useful in poetry but not most communications – and, yet, English speakers break that rule with vigor everyday, which leaves one to wonder if we’re all just broken or if we have an allergy to precision – or does that ambiguity have some sort of survival value?
