A book reviewer regretted the author was not able to “winkle” an anecdote out of a famous raconteur.
A ground combat squad “winkled” the snipers out of their fortified hidey-holes.
And the Welsh street vendors were selling mussels, winkles, and eels. It turns out a winkle is a kind of bashful barnacle that has to be pushed or tweezed or squeezed out of its crevice. "Winkled into" a tight spot doesn't appear. Just "winkled out of."
My understanding of “to winkle” is that it meant to extract something difficult to extract. However, the usage in the article was the opposite, to hunker down in a position from which it would be difficult to extract one. So there’s a connection, but it’s kind of the opposite, like “cleave” and “cleave.” Or, one of those things where a person is using a word, but they don’t know what it means.
I could tell you my verbal SAT score, but that would be boring, so I’ll just say that almost everyone on Earth uses the English language in a way that causes me pain. It must be what Pat feels when people make math errors.