If you think there is an Irish/Gaelic root, give it to us! … I’m not doubting you because it very well could have one. I would just like see your ideas on it.

Slipping a word like “fainaigue” under the umbrella of Old English and then trying to create a Norman association seems a little tenuous for something with the complicated affect and implicit rule-breaking tenor (always suggesting the entry of class-control issues) of finagle.

One of these days I mean to write something about the OED’s high-toned oblivion to the cultural and class issues that either shaped new words or distorted the original meanings of older English words. Look at sheriff or felon as example of new words confirming the property interests of the Norman aristocracy in conflict with the concerns of the little people whose work supported their lifestyle. Among the old words is “silly” which has slipped from something like a magical concept to a dismissal. And don’t even get me started on “lust.”

I realize I’m ranting here, and I apologize. But in my etymological cosmology, “social control” words like this are either bastardizations of more positive concepts originating in the pre-Roman or pre-Christian eras, or words developed by early ruling or propertied classes to convince the formerly unruly natives that serfdom is in their best interests.

And so, I suspect that such words often developed a separate usage among those under-classes. In the world I grew up in, finagling was a good thing, valued as a survival skill as well as a kind of social commentary. It was modeled for us as children, and we were expected to learn it. But it was also a “secret” in the sense that we would never admit to it to anyone outside the family or cultural group (where it was celebrated). It was, in a small way, a form of revolutionary behavior, nibbling at the empire as it were.

Finally, having grown up with these kinds of ideas, I was very interested when I went to London and was exposed to the London cabbies, who all seemed to be of a similar class. (And actually, since I do PR for a living, I should also acknowledge the old-fashioned type of English muck-raking journalist.) Cynical, resigned about the inevitability of class inequity, but relentlessly poking at it with jokes and instructional tales of greed, stupidity and corruption. All with accents and usages that were far from the Queen’s English.

NES