@FanOfMostEverything  
Ah, it makes sense now. Thanks.

@Chinigan O’ Donovan  
I quote from Mendacity:
 
The cellar was, as always, in a state of mild chaos; this was Lyra’s lair, and it showed. Tools and sheet music lay scattered about on the flagstones of the floor, the walls were covered with posters and diagrams, and a good third of the room was completely taken up by the hulking thicket of copper pipes, repurposed lyre strings, cogs, and gears that Lyra called her “fing-er,” designed to give her a set of artificial, opposable claws, like those of a dragon—ostensibly to make it easier for her to play her lyre, but Bon Bon suspected that it ran a little deeper than that, particularly considering Lyra’s current attempts to miniaturize the fing-er so that, as she put it, “I could fing all over the place! Anytime I want! I could just trot to the marketplace and if I see something I want, FING! I just pick it up! Just like that! Just like that, Bon Bon!” She had never really been able to explain where her word “fing” had come from; it just felt right, she said.

@Fortune  
What exactly is the act of “finging”?

They look like big strong hands, don’t they?

“They call them ‘fingers’, but I’ve never seem them fing. Oh wait, there they go…”