mend one's fences

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Improve poor relations; placate personal, political, or business contacts. For example, The senator always goes home weekends and spends time mending his fences. This metaphoric expression dates from an 1879 speech by Senator John Sherman in Mansfield, Ohio, to which he said he had returned “to look after my fences.” Although he may have meant literally to repair the fences around his farm there, media accounts of the speech took him to mean campaigning among his constituents. In succeeding decades the term was applied to nonpolitical affairs as well.

QUIZZES

QUIZ YOURSELF ON PARENTHESES AND BRACKETS APLENTY!

Set some time apart to test your bracket symbol knowledge, and see if you can keep your parentheses, squares, curlies, and angles all straight!

Question 1 of 7

Let’s start with some etymology: What are the origins of the typographical word “bracket”?

First appeared around 1750, and is related to the French word “braguette” for the name of codpiece armor.

First appeared in 1610, based on the French word “baguette” for the long loaf of bread.

First appeared in 1555, and is related to the French word “raquette” for a netted bat.

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Words nearby mend one's fences

mendicant, mendicity, mending, Mendips, Mendocino, mend one's fences, mend one's ways, Mendota, Mendoza, Mendoza Line, Meneer

Example sentences from the Web for mend one's fences

Added to drinking water at concentrations of around one part per million, fluoride ions stick to dental plaque.
Anti-Fluoriders Are The OG Anti-Vaxxers|Michael Schulson|July 27, 2016|DAILY BEAST
In his view, a writer has only one duty: to be present in his books.
Houellebecq’s Incendiary Novel Imagines France With a Muslim President|Pierre Assouline|January 9, 2015|DAILY BEAST
Yet this, in the end, is a book from which one emerges sad, gloomy, disenchanted, at least if we agree to take it seriously.
Houellebecq’s Incendiary Novel Imagines France With a Muslim President|Pierre Assouline|January 9, 2015|DAILY BEAST
The fear of violence should not determine what one does or does not say.
Trolls and Martyrdom: Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie|Arthur Chu|January 9, 2015|DAILY BEAST

The al Qaeda-linked gunmen shot back, but only managed to injure one officer before they were taken out.
France Kills Charlie Hebdo Murderers|Nico Hines|January 9, 2015|DAILY BEAST
Practise gliding in the form of inflection, or slide, from one extreme of pitch to another.
Expressive Voice Culture|Jessie Eldridge Southwick
He alludes to it as one of their evil customs and used by them to produce insensibility.
Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce|E. R. Billings.
There was a rumor that Alessandro and his father had both died; but no one knew anything certainly.
Ramona|Helen Hunt Jackson
Truth is a torch, but one of enormous size; so that we slink past it in rather a blinking fashion for fear it should burn us.
Pearls of Thought|Maturin M. Ballou
Under the one-sixth they appear as slender, highly refractive fibers with double contour and, often, curled or split ends.
A Manual of Clinical Diagnosis|James Campbell Todd

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