Eggcorn Forum

“Fix” is the all-purpose AmEng verb. A century and half ago Charles Dickens noticed the American fix-ation on the word in chapter ten of his American Notes:

At about six o’clock, all the small tables were put together to form one long table, and everybody sat down to tea, coffee, bread, butter, salmon, shad, liver, steaks, potatoes, pickles, ham, chops, black-puddings, and sausages.
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‘Will you try,’ said my opposite neighbour, handing me a dish of potatoes, broken up in milk and butter, ‘will you try some of these fixings?’
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There are few words which perform such various duties as this word ’fix.’ It is the Caleb Quotem of the American vocabulary. You call upon a gentleman in a country town, and his help informs you that he is ‘fixing himself’ just now, but will be down directly: by which you are to understand that he is dressing. You inquire, on board a steamboat, of a fellow-passenger, whether breakfast will be ready soon, and he tells you he should think so, for when he was last below, they were ‘fixing the tables:’ in other words, laying the cloth. You beg a porter to collect your luggage, and he entreats you not to be uneasy, for he’ll ‘fix it presently:’ and if you complain of indisposition, you are advised to have recourse to Doctor So-and-so, who will ‘fix you’ in no time.
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One night, I ordered a bottle of mulled wine at an hotel where I was staying, and waited a long time for it; at length it was put upon the table with an apology from the landlord that he feared it wasn’t ‘fixed properly.’ And I recollect once, at a stage-coach dinner, overhearing a very stern gentleman demand of a waiter who presented him with a plate of underdone roast-beef, ‘whether he called that, fixing God A’mighty’s vittles?’

“Fix” may not be the factotum it was in the nineteenth century, but it still slips itself in where it can. One curious place it now calls home are the words “fixtitious” and “fixitious,” both occasional eggcorns for “fictitious.” Something that is fictitious is a truth that has been fixed up to be something else. Or perhaps we get the false version because the fix is in.

Examples of “fixtitious/fixitious” below. Note the last two entries: the fix fix appeals to more than just Americans.

Posted comment on a web forum: “Correct. I have 6 different accounts on here and every one of them has a different email address which, I may add, are totally fixtitious ”

Comment on a movie review “James Bond is not only a fixitious character. He is a real hero lives in millions of persons minds.”

Forum post from Florida “You’d think people wouldn’t be so gullible as to swaloow the lies from Hollywood fixtitious films”

A forum post from Yorkshire: “Your argument has been purely hypothetical – how sad that you had to deam up a fixtitious situation and present it as fact.”

Post on a Canadian political web site: “The judge’s ruling opens the door for malicious people filing fixtitious motions who are granted access to personal information not to sue as they assert but to harass and file section 13 complaints against Canadians. ”