It is sometimes difficult for the older generation to understand youth. The computer age and the massive spread of the Internet have given a huge influx of Englishisms into the Russian language. If you listen to the conversations of students or go to the hardware store, you can hear the word "fixed." What does this mean, how is it used and can it be used on an ongoing basis?
From mechanics to numbers
Slang appears on the basis of familiar terms, which, under the influence of time, acquire new meanings. In the basic version, the English verb to fix denoted a solution to the problem, eliminating an ambiguous situation:
What to do when the wiring in the house burned out, pipes leaked, the railing loosened? For all this, there is a magical universal action - to fix. Gradually, the first computers appeared, and homegrown enthusiasts began experimenting with program code. The boards burned out, the wires melted, and the simplest files refused to work. A similar situation continued with the emergence of the World Wide Web: to this day, maintaining the site requires a lot of skill.
Naturally, computer scientists had nothing to come up with new words. I saw a problem - “fixed”, which means I fixed it. In English, this sounds harmonious, while Russian-speaking citizens simply took to fix and adapted it to the norms of native speech. They took the morphology of the word “repaired” as the basis, they just replaced the root -chin- with -fix-, creating an independent slang unit.
From virtuality to reality
Now everyone has gadgets. They are handed out to employees, introduced into school and preschool education. Smartphones and computers have become the norm for citizens, therefore, thematic slang expressions gradually penetrate into everyday speech. Now you can “fix” a shelf in the bathroom or a crookedly hanging picture. The most common word is still in the computer industry and in the gaming field:
The latter value affects not only glitches, but also cosmetic changes. It emerged from the opinion that some phenomenon in the game is “broken”: not the way the players want it to be. Accordingly, it urgently needs to be fixed, “fixed”. What this means in each case, the context will tell.
Required replacement
Is it possible to say that in everyday life? There is a wonderful Russian word “repair” with exactly the same meaning. It is shorter and faster pronounced, any native speaker will understand it. Also suitable for official reporting documents. But when you want to make friends with youth, to identify yourself as an understanding person, you can safely “fix” everything that was simply repaired before. The main thing is not to break anything along the way!