Wallstrait

• Wall Street: a street in New York → supposedly built by Irish navvies (like Tim Finnegan)
  • A Finnegans Wake Gazetteer
  • A Finnegans Wake Gazetteer

• Wall Street Crash: The Wall Street Crash, or Black Thursday, refers to 24 October 1929, the day when the New York Stock Exchange crashed, leading eventually to the Great Depression. The crash followed a speculative boom that had taken hold in the late 1920s, and which had led millions of Americans to invest heavily in the stock market
  • Wikipedia

• well-straight → looks like a calque of a Romance language; cf. Greek orthodox

• straight as a wall: plumb, i.e., "straight (down) as a well (shaft)". Cf. Eve and Adam's. Possibly a fall down a well-straight, i.e., without any sort of swerve, implies that Finnegan (who is falling) has no free will, according to Epicurean doctrine

• Humpty Dumpty: (nursery rhyme): "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall..."

• strait: difficulty, crisis; narrow sea-passage

• Walkin Street: a street in Boston; cf. the first line of the ballad Finnegan's Wake: "Tim Finnegan lived in Walkin Street..."