An interesting letter arrived recently from Canon Brian Lougheed, of St Mary's Rectory, Ballycasheen, Co Kerry. The word finagle is bothering him. A friend of his used the word as he would himself to both it means to achieve something against the odds, as in making a contract in bridge that one really doesn't deserve.
Webster was consulted, and to the canon's surprise the word has been given the meaning "to obtain by guile or swindling".
Finagle, I was myself surprised to find, is 29th century American. It is a variant of a much older word still used in Dorset, Devon and Cornwall, and also in Gloucestershire. Collins says that finagle is an informal word, and that it means to get or achieve by trickery, craftiness or persuasion and in all the great dictionaries the word carries the whiff of deceit.
At any rate, the older word from which finagle comes is fainaigue. There are, however, quite a number of variants to be found in the dialect glossaries of England, feneage, finague, furnaig, and venaig among them.
It means (1) to revoke at cards, to renege; (2) to fail of a promise, to play truant, to shirk work. Notes and Queries for 1854 has, Thom Cornwall: "Most frequently applied to cases where a man has shown appearances of courtship to a woman and then left her without any apparent reason. (3) To deceive by flattery to obtain by improper means, to cheat.
From Cornwall again, there is a couplet that goes: "But a maiden came one day and feneagued his heart away." Its origin? Probably Old French fornier, to deny somebody or something - God, a charge, for instance (modern nier, denier), this from Latin foris, from abroad, and negare, to deny, I think.
James Maher from Tipperary, wants to know where the expression the back of God speed comes from. The God speed was a screen placed in front of the door of a house to keep off the wind. Hence the expression came to mean an unfrequented place that nobody wants to visit.
God is found in many interesting expressions. God's child is the Sussex term for a mentally handicapped person, their equivalent of our duine le Dia. God forgive me is a jug used for heating ale. You'll still see them hanging in old Dorset pubs. Hardy mentions them in Far From The Madding Crowd.