fainaigue

Verb

fainaigue (third-person singular simple present fainaigues, present participle fainaiguing, simple past and past participle fainaigued)

1. (UK, dialectal, transitive) To achieve or obtain (something) by complicated or deceitful methods; to finagle, to wangle.
   • [Edmund] Richardson's contract lapsed in 1871, but five years later the almost incredible Jones Hamilton, who played with plantations, race tracks, railroads, and steamboats as a reckless boy plays with marbles, fainaigued a similar agreement.1958, [Jay] Saunders Redding, “Mississippi Delta”, in Lewis Gannett, editor, The Lonesome Road: The Story of the Negro’s Part in America (Mainstream of America Series), Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday &...
   • The Swabian abbots were in this way fainaigued into choosing [Adam] Adami, but this arrangement still left him without the so-called Virilstimme or final vote.1969 September, Fintan M. Phayer, “Adam Adami and the Peace of Westphalia”, in Timothy Fry, editor, The American Benedictine Review, volume XX, number 3, Atchison, Kan.: The American Benedictine...
2. (UK, dialectal, transitive) To cheat or deceive (someone).
   • He agreed with the boy for a month at £4 a-year, and he went away and feneaged that boy, and never took him nor paid him.1880, M[argaret] A[nn] Courtney, “Feneaged”, in M. A. Courtney, Thomas Q[uiller] Couch, Glossary of Words in Use in Cornwall, London: […] [F]or the English Dialect Society by Trübner & Co., […]...
   • [H]e was doing a stitch of time in Ohio for embezzlement and for fainaiguing a good-hearted Jack under the alias Joseph […]2010 June 3, Neil Baker, “Jest because You’re You”, in G Day: Please God, Get Me Off the Hook, Bloomington, Ind.: AuthorHouse, →ISBN, page 142
3. (UK, dialectal, intransitive) To evade work or shirk responsibility.
4. (UK, dialectal, intransitive) To fail to keep a promise; to renege.
5. (UK, dialectal, intransitive) To renege (“break one's commitment to follow suit when capable”).
   • When Mr. Simpson had spoken of the "Jack of Oaks" (meaning the Knave of Clubs), or had said "fainaiguing" (where others said "revoking"), we had pretended not to notice it, until at length we actually did not.[1888, Q. [pseudonym; Arthur Quiller-Couch], “Of Deterioration; and a Wheelbarrow that Contained Unexpected Things”, in The Astonishing History of Troy Town, London; Paris: Cassell & Company, […]...