She barely noticed them but knew couldn’t get through the day without them. Thanks to her, we now see them everywhere. — If you don’t name something, you can’t see it. In 2003, in a paper entitled, “The Consequential Stranger: Peripheral Relationships across the Life Span,” psychologist Karen Fingerman, now Professor of Human Development & Family Sciences at UT Austin, used her own life to illustrate the term she coined to describe relationships we tend to overlook or undervalue.