In "Starting Fresh" in the 18 January 2021 issue of "The New Yorker", Margaret Talbot uses a German word I don't think I've seen in English before: "But crystallized intelligence—the ability to draw on one’s accumulated store of knowledge, expertise, and Fingerspitzengefühl—is often enriched by advancing age." I checked the Corpus of Contemporary American English (one billion words) and the Corpus of Historical American English (400 million words), and "Fingerspitzengefühl" does not appear in either, while the supposedly "untranslatable" "Schadenfreude" (that's another issue) has 349 hits in COCA and 17 in COHA. Without my defining "Fingerspitzengefühl" here, I wonder how many of my non-Germanophone English-speaking friends know the word. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 25 January 2021)
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