Finagle

Word of the Day for Friday, August 9, 2013

Finagle \fi-NEY-guhl\, verb:

1. to trick, swindle, or cheat (a person) (often followed by out of): He finagled the backers out of a fortune.
2. to get or achieve (something) by guile, trickery, or manipulation: to finagle an assignment to the Membership Committee.
3. to practice deception or fraud; scheme.

But the law's the law now, and not a contest between a lot of men paid to grin and lie and yell and finagle for whatever somebody wanted them to grin and lie and yell and finagle about.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano, 1952

The high school biology department had been given a gift of some three hundred hamsters for the purpose of dissection, and Jerry diligently finagled to collect the skins from the biology students…
-- Philip Roth, American Pastoral, 1997

Finagle likely comes from the English dialect term fainaigue meaning "to cheat." It entered English in the 1920s.

 

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