The etymology of departir takes us to the Latin language . The word departīre refers to dividing something; That is why the first meanings of the term were linked to making a division, a separation or a differentiation.
Nowadays, however, departir refers to conversing or chatting. When two people talk, what they do is talk. For example: “A woman was beaten by her husband while chatting with a young man in a bar”, “The actor will visit a primary school to chat with the children”, “After chatting with the coach for a few seconds, the footballer left the field of game”.
Take the case of a student who, upon receiving the result of an evaluation, is not satisfied with the grade given by the teacher. Faced with this situation, he approaches the teacher and asks for a few minutes to talk. The educator accepts and then both start a dialogue: the teacher explains why he qualified it that way and the student tries to convince him that said qualification is unfair.
By conversing, the people involved evidence their intention to communicate. Many times, people talk with the objective of reaching an agreement or an understanding. In the case of the example mentioned above, there is one individual requesting an explanation or clarification and another trying to satisfy that request.
Sometimes a subject expresses his desire or willingness to talk, but the other does not agree to dialogue. It can also happen that someone starts talking even though he is not really willing to listen to his interlocutor or review his own points of view.
It is important to clarify that in everyday speech the verb to depart is not used, but instead others are used, such as «talk, discuss, dialogue, chat» or «converse». This usually happens with many terms, which are reserved especially for the written language or for very formal areas, where communication is structured by a rigid series of expressions.
Speech is an indispensable part of our life in society, since it is the most versatile tool we have at our disposal to understand others and make ourselves understood, to express our needs and achieve our goals. People who receive an education aimed at silence for fear of making others uncomfortable with their ideas are the ones who experience the most difficulties when it comes to relating.
Whether it is a talk or an argument, words should not scare us but we should learn to stand above them, to use them for what they really are: resources. If we are not satisfied with a grade at school or with the treatment we have received in a store, if we want to express to a friend that we do not like an attitude of theirs or to our parents that we do not agree with their ideas, we should always do use of speech to deal with all these problems.
The dictionary does not offer us antonyms for the verb departir, because terms like «shut up» do not accurately reflect all that «not converse, not converse» entails, an attitude that can be closer to «not existing» than to simply avoiding the use of saliva and the speech apparatus to emit articulated and conjugated sounds.
As a curiosity, we can point out that although in the dictionary prepared by the Royal Spanish Academy there are eight meanings for this term, seven of them are in disuse; In addition to the already mentioned «distribute, separate, cut into parts », the following are listed: «altercar»; “explain, teach”; “distinguish, differentiate”; «judge, discuss»; “hinder, prevent”; «delimit a land or a country».
