I love to play with language. It's amazing, really. We make a load of sounds with our larynxes, and depending on what noises we make, we can engender wonder, amusement, tears, anger, annoyance, empathy, happiness, laughter, sadness...the list goes on and on.

Speakeasy?

Yet we take it for granted. It's understandable; most of the time our choice of language is little more than functional. Our communications serve a purpose. It's a means to an end. Too often, I think.

Apparently, the average grown-up English speaker has a vocabulary of 20000-30000 words. If you want to found out whether this is true for you, you could go here, like I just did. Do the test, if you have five minutes - it's clever and quick. It estimated that I know about 27000 words, which doesn't sound like a particularly brobdingnagian amount, but what can you do?

No, me neither, I just looked it up! Sorry about that.

That's literally a big word!

So I want to try and doing something about us taking words for granted. I want to try and expand our collective vocabularies, one word at a time.

Today's word is "finagle". It means has two meanings: to obtain something by indirect or involved means, or, to obtain something by trickery.

As in - the enigmatic internet user managed to finagle some upvotes on a crypto-website by writing a fascinating article on words...

Enjoy your day!