No— Maggid means “glorious”, “magnificent”, “excellent”, from the root m + j + d
@Broomstick is thinking of Maggid as in a teacher or preacher of the Torah, from the root n+ j + d, a completely different name that does not resemble the other one in any way whatsoever 
Did you mean to say Naggid?
No (calling @Johanna !?) in the hif’il construction, you get “higgid” — it is a weak root and the nun gets assimilated — which gives you “maggid” as the masculine singular active participle.
cf
It’s because in Hebrew the letter nun נ assimilates to the following consonant: the /n/ sound vanishes and the following consonant becomes doubled in length. So the nun in the root of נֶגֶד (néged) loses its vowel and comes up against the following gimel, which triggers assimilation. The underlying structure is ma+neged > *mangid > maggid.
The same assimilation is clearly seen comparing, for example, shibboleth to its Arabic cognate, sunbulat, where Proto-Semitic *nb > bb. In the second-person pronouns, Arabic anta, anti, antum, antunna correspond to Hebrew attoh, att, attem, atten, where nt > tt. Clear?
Not in my opinion 
The ritual handwashing, as you know, isn’t specifically a seder thing, but is done at every meal among the Orthodox. So if you don’t do it regularly, no reason you should make a special point of doing it at the seder IMO. Also, although I’d never heard the phrase before, what Smapti’s rabbi called the “Oregon handwash”, just waving your fingers in the air, seems to be pretty universally accepted as a quicker option. (not sure what a strictly orthodox opinion would be there)
I think I’ll file that with “i also mix milk with meat”. And our Seder usually has a meat entree and a dairy dessert. Heck, this year, the main course included chicken, hollandaise sauce (for the asparagus, not for the chicken) and rice. 
We are scrupulous about avoiding any wheat, oat, rye, barley, and spelt that isn’t made into kosher matzo, though.
I’m more embarrassed about the “psalms of praise”. I might add at least a couple of lines back into our practice. My plan is to write a Haggadah for my family’s use, updating the 1975 text we are using, and leaving out the portions we always skip. I’m collecting samples in a variety of styles – mostly short, mostly liberal, mostly modern. But i will also be looking at the Maxwell House version as I pull this together.
I’ve had the impression the milk and meat taboo was during the cooking process, not the eating – seething a kid in its mother’s milk and all that.
Having a bowl of cream of tomato soup along with your tongue sandwich is perfectly fine, beef stroganoff not so much.
My understanding is that this prohibition was extended to eating meat with dairy as a chumra - a.k.a. “building a fence around the Torah.”
The LORD: Thou shalt not boil a kid in the milk of its mother!
Moses: Right! So we can’t eat any dairy products within four hours of eating any kind of meat?
The LORD: What? No, that’s fine, just don’t boil a kid in the milk of its mother!
Moses: I guess we’ll need to keep two separate sets of plates and utensils, then.
The LORD: Are you high? All you need to do is not boil a kid in the milk of its mother!
Moses: And poultry counts as meat? Got it!
The LORD: Oh, the hell with it, do whatever you want.
You write “Moses”, but AIUI the milk-and-meat prohibition is Talmudic law that is not followed by, e.g., most Karaite Jews.
Yeah, what they said. The Torah injunction is incredibly narrow and precise. Don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk. But the modern interpretation by Orthodox (and many Conservative) Jews is that you need to use separate plates for meat meals and milk meals (and for passover and the rest of the year. My father said that his chief memory of passover as a child was carrying loads of dishes from the basement to the kitchen and vice versa. The formal meat dishes, the formal dairy dishes, the informal dairy dishes…) When I’m a house guest with my college roommate, a convert to Conservative Judaism, I’m careful not to put a spoon in the writing part of the dishwasher, because maybe a dishwasher counts as cooking or something, and i wouldn’t want to put a milk-contaminated cereal spoon in the same compartment as the plate my chicken was on. Never mind that chickens don’t even produce milk.
Weirdly, fish doesn’t count as meat, and can be put on either the meat dishes or the dairy dishes. But my roommate keeps a third set of pareve dishes, for foods that contain neither milk nor meat.
Um. I don’t do that. You can have a new paper plate if you don’t want to eat off my dishes. And, um, eat with your fingers.
Fwiw, I’ve never actually cooked a goat or lamb in it’s mother’s milk. I only keep cow milk in the house. And while i have occasionally cooked beef with milk (not often, it’s not my thing) i know the sourcing for my milk and beef well enough to be quite certain I’ve never boiled a calf in its mother’s milk, either.
I hear that the Sephardic Jews don’t combine fish and dairy. Don’t quote me on that.
[Monty Python reference] How shall we fuck off, O Lord? [/MPr]
I haven’t read much Talmud yet, but the extent to which the rabbinic sages got into the weeds on topics like this kinda makes me wonder if some of them were just high-functioning autists whose wisdom was just the product of a spectrum disorder that there was no diagnosis for at the time. It would certainly explain how you get from “thou shalt not boil a kid in its mother’s milk”, which probably originated as a warning against imitating some other tribe’s sacrificial practices, to “don’t boil any animal in it’s mother’s milk, and don’t eat meat and dairy together at all because you don’t know if that dairy came from it’s mother’s milk, and don’t even let them touch on the same plate or combine in your stomach, and don’t eat poultry with dairy either, because dove meat kinda looks like beef and if someone saw you they might think you were eating milk and meat together and therefore it’s OK for them to do it to, and you know what? It’s probably best if you have two completely different kitchens in your house, one for meat and one for milk, so you just steer clear of the whole can of worms altogether. Don’t eat worms either, BTW.” Being a rabbi wasn’t a paying job back then - these guys had full-time jobs on top of spending all their free time arguing over the details of Biblical law and obsolete Temple rites. They were in this for the love of the game.
In any event, the Seder I went to probably wouldn’t have met Orthodox standards, since the matzah ball soup was made with chicken broth and there was almost certainly milk in the chocolate desserts. I do understand that the temple’s kitchen is typically only used for preparing dairy products and they only serve meat made in the kitchen if they do a thorough cleaning first, so I guess the Seder food having been made off-site and just served in the building was enough to satisfy that requirement for any members who are sticklers for halacha. In the Intro to Judaism class, the rabbi said he’s only keeps “kosher-style” in his personal life - he doesn’t eat pork or shellfish, and typically won’t mix meat and dairy in home cooking, but he’s more lenient if he’s dining out.
I think a lot of the ordinary dishes back when those rules were made were unglazed pottery, or pottery decorated with a thin layer of another clay. So it was kinda absorbent, and probably was never really clean by modern standards. There’s even a special exemption for glassware, which can be cleaned and them used for different food. That was partly because glassware was really expensive, but also… It was easier to clean.
I mean, i enjoy some nice seasoned butter on my steak. I don’t follow that rule at all. But i have a lot of friends who believe that modern glazed china plates can be cleaned, and keep kosher, but are willing to eat off my plates.
But I’m sure you are right that the rabbis enjoyed arguing fine rules of law for the sake of the argument.
That’s true, but there are only about 50,000 Karaites in the world.
(And regular Jews know that everything in the Talmud was, in fact, communicated by God to Moses on Mt. Sinai, and then transmitted in a completely uncorrupted oral tradition for a couple thousand years before being written down. We know this because it says so in the Talmud.)
At a catered seder hosted by a synagogue, even a very liberal one, I would be very surprised if those desserts contained dairy.
Was it on this board where someone was saying they were an Orthodox Jew, keeping super rigorous kosher standards above and beyond the minimum standard, and they had someone over for dinner who proceeded to point out the many ways in which they were not good enough and doing things wrong?
Reminds me of the time I was sitting on an airplane next to a Jewish couple, and when the meal was served, they had a special Kosher one. This came with a certificate, which they proceeded to examine minutely for a couple of minutes, then they sent the meal back. They got an even more kosher meal instead (?), but that too was rejected. Finally, they pulled out some rice crackers they had brought with them in case of just such an eventuality. I asked them what they consider kosher, and they replied that only a certificate signed by a rabbi they personally know and trust or vouched for by such a person counts.
AIUI, dishes can be koshered just by being immersed in boiling water or steam, which happens every time you run them through your dishwasher. There’s no real justification for the Orthodox claim that this isn’t good enough.
At my synagogue, the “meals on wheels” program cooks non-kosher chicken in the synagogue ovens. (It’s often halal, because the place where we shop sells halal chicken, for only slightly more than the regular chicken, and it’s often fresher or otherwise looks better.) And at my synagogue, it’s okay to mix milk and meat in the kitchen. They don’t allow pork or shellfish to be served, cooked, or stored in the fridge, but that’s about the only nod to kashrut.
My understanding is that that’s only true of glass and metal dishes. (And maybe it needs to be a mikvah, and not any old water.) Which is why conservative friends who have one set of dishes sometimes long out that every dish they own is coated in a thin layer of glass.
But I’ve heard slightly different stories from different sources. I used to hang out with a lubuvitcher, and with a guy who went to high school in a school that mostly trained wanna-be rabbis, both of whom were very knowledgeable, but sometimes had minor disagreements on details. (They didn’t talk about this stuff to each other, but both talked to me, because i was curious.)