I was very surprised indeed to read recently that the verb to fix, in its meanings to mend, to get ready, and to arrange, is found only in Ireland, Lincolnshire, the Isle of Man, and the United States, where these meanings originated, according to Oxford.
I am concerned here only with fix in the senses I have mentioned (there must be at least 20 others). The verb is ultimately from the Latin fixus, past participle of figere, to fasten, but as "mend" it first appeared in literature in America, in a memoir of 1762 which reads: "A number of hands came to fix our whale-boats." In 1870 Mark Twain wrote in Sketches Old and New: "I finally took the watch to another watchmaker. He fixed it, and gave it a fresh start."
I quote these Americans because Dickens, in his American Notes of 1842, felt obliged to comment on these odd senses: "There are few words which perform such various duties as this word fix. You call upon a gentleman: his help informs you that he is fixing himself. You inquire of a fellow passenger whether breakfast will be ready soon, and he tells you that they are fixing the tables (laying the cloth)."
Fix in the sense mend amused him too: he thought, "How do you mean to fix it?" It's hard to believe that fix, "mend", and phrases so common in Ireland, such as "fix your hair", "fix your desk", meaning tidy it, are confined to such a small area of our neighbouring island.
The dialect adverb again, meaning "in time for" is alive and well in Ireland, I'm glad to say. A wicklow shoemaker told me yesterday he'd have my shoes mended "again you come back". Massinger, in his play City Madam (1602), has: "His cap and pantofles ready, and a candle again you rise" (pantofles, from French pantoufle, slipper). A Waterford woman told me she would keep me a turkey "again the Christmas". Chaucer has it in this sense: "Ageyn this lusty someres tyde This mirrour . . . He has sent." And from Antrim, in the sense "in the future", Wright's great dictionary recorded: "I didn't do it yet, but I'll do it again." He asks us to compare the 1611 translation of Genesis: "I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake."