I asked my clerk what was taking the lawyers in the courtroom so long that we could not begin the afternoon calendar at the scheduled time. She said that the defense attorneys were trying to "finagle a deal out of the prosecutor." I told her she should be careful in front of whom she used such language and she was puzzled. Her sense of the word is that it means merely to negotiate. My sense is that it carries much more pejorative overtones. Who's right?