finesse vs ideal

finesse

noun
  • The property of having elegance, grace, refinement, or skill. 

  • An adroit manoeuvre. 

  • In bridge, whist, etc.: a technique which allows one to win a trick, usually by playing a card when it is thought that a card that can beat it is held by another player whose turn is over. 

  • Skill in the handling or manipulation of a situation. 

verb
  • To play (a card) as a finesse. 

  • To obtain something from someone through trickery or manipulation. 

  • To evade (a problem, situation, etc.) by using some clever argument or stratagem. 

  • To attempt to win a trick by finessing. 

  • To handle or manage carefully or skilfully; to manipulate in a crafty way. 

ideal

noun
  • A perfect standard of beauty, intellect etc., or a standard of excellence to aim at. 

  • A subsemigroup with the property that if any semigroup element outside of it is added to any one of its members, the result must lie outside of it. 

  • A subring closed under multiplication by its containing ring. 

  • A non-empty lower set (of a partially ordered set) which is closed under binary suprema (a.k.a. joins). 

  • A collection of sets, considered small or negligible, such that every subset of each member and the union of any two members are also members of the collection. 

  • A Lie subalgebra (subspace that is closed under the Lie bracket) 𝖍 of a given Lie algebra 𝖌 such that the Lie bracket [𝖌,𝖍] is a subset of 𝖍. 

adj
  • Not actually present, but considered as present when limits at infinity are included. 

  • Optimal; being the best possibility. 

  • Existing only in the mind; conceptual, imaginary. 

  • Pertaining to ideas, or to a given idea. 

  • Perfect, flawless, having no defects. 

  • Teaching or relating to the doctrine of idealism. 

How often have the words finesse and ideal occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )