Mr. Skim of Dewey, Cheatem & Howe called.

Dear Word Detective:  Is the word “finagle” of Gaelic descent?  My maiden name was Nagle.  We descended from County Cork, Ireland.  Just wondering. — Catherine Meyer.

Hey, I understand.  Names are very personal things.  When you’re a kid you try to imagine where your name came from, some way it makes sense and how the particular mojo of your name might shape your life.  If your name is Baker or Smith, of course, somewhere way back on the family tree there probably was a baker or a blacksmith.  But does it also work the other way?  How many kids today subconsciously tilt towards a career in cooking because their name is Baker?  And how many little Smiths are doomed to a life of furtively registering in seedy motels?  Such questions are, sadly, beyond my ken, which is another name fraught with questions.  But hey, how weird is it that the Ponzi scheme uncovered in 2008 that bilked investors of $50 billion was run by a guy whose name is pronounced “made off”?   Next time the Clue Phone rings, folks, I suggest you consider answering it.

Where were we?  Right, the “Nagle-finagle” connection, if any.  Well, if you’re wondering whether your true calling might have been as a flim-flam artist, I’d say no.  As far as I’ve been able to tell, there’s no connection between your name and the verb “finagle,” meaning “to use dishonest or devious tactics to get something by trickery.”  And while I’m not an expert in onomastics (the study of proper names, from the Greek “onoma,” name, which is related to the word “name” itself), “Nagle” strikes me as an eminently trustworthy moniker.

“Finagle,” on the other hand, even sounds shifty.  A “finagler” is a schemer, someone who doesn’t so much swindle you as maneuver you into doing something good for him.  “Finagling” also often means “to fudge, to fiddle” with rules or figures, or to bypass rules or restrictions with smooth talk (“Any attempt to fudge or finagle or to get ahead of the other fellow will be recognized by the judge for what it is,” 1955).

Although “finagle” first appeared in the 1920s and is considered US slang, its roots apparently lie in the English rural dialect term “fainaigue,” meaning “to cheat.”  There are some indications that the term may originally have come from cards, where it meant to fail to follow suit (play a card of the same suit as the preceding) when able or required to do so.

Whither withers?

Dear Word Detective:   Is the word “dewlap” Shakespearean?  I mean, did Shakespeare make it up? — Andy McCollough.

That’s a good question.  And while we’re at it, what’s up with all the obscure terminology associated with farm animals?  “Dewlap”?  “Fetlock”?  “Withers”?  “Pastern”?  Correct me if I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that all mammals shared the same basic bits — head, ears, hips, legs, feet and so on.  Now, I have in-laws who seem to spend most of their time queuing up for major elective surgery, such as hip or knee replacements.  Listening to these people is an anatomy lesson in itself.  But not once have I heard one of them announce that Doctor Lamborghini thinks they need a “fetlock replacement” or a “pastern repair.”  Someone has some explaining to do.

Speaking of “pasterns,” one of my favorite stories about Dr. Samuel Johnson, author of the first true dictionary of the English language, concerns Johnson’s response to a woman demanding to know how he could have erroneously defined “pastern” in his dictionary as “the knee of a horse” (which it isn’t).  “Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance,” Johnson replied.

Onward.  A “dewlap” is, as you probably know, the fold of loose skin which hangs from the throat of cattle and similar animals, and, by extension (in humor or unkindness), from the throats of some people.  Similar formations in some animals, particularly chickens and US Senators, are called “wattles.”

Shakespeare didn’t coin “dewlap,” but he was, apparently, fond of the word.  The Oxford English Dictionary lists two citations for “dewlap,” in early spellings, both from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“When she drinkes, against her lips I bob, And on her wither’d dewlop poure the Ale” and “My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kinde … Crooke-kneed, and dew-lapt, like Thessalian Buls”).

When Shakespeare was writing at the end of the 16th century, however, “dewlap” had already been in use for at least two centuries.  It first appeared, as far as we know, in 1398 applied to oxen.  The “lap” of “dewlap” is from the Old English “laeppa,” meaning “pendulous piece or flap,” but the “dew” part is a bit of a mystery.  You might assume that, as the animal grazes in a morning meadow, that flap of skin collects dew from the grass.  But in the related and equivalent forms of “dewlap” in Scandinavian languages (e.g., the Danish “doglaeb” and the Swedish “droglapp”), the first element does not mean “dew.”  That’s a problem.

Etymologists now believe that the first part of “dewlap” was originally a word that sounded a bit like “dew” but has now become obsolete and unfamiliar, and that over the years people replaced it with the more familiar “dew.”  This process of substituting the familiar for the obscure is known as “folk etymology,” and it’s how, for instance, “catercornered” (“cater” being an old English word for “four”) became “kittycornered” after people forgot what “cater” meant.  “Kittycornered” made no sense at all, of course, but it had the virtue of at least sounding a bit less alien.