work the hyphens
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.17 in modern English
35
Scrabble Score
14
Letters
2
Syllables
11
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To facilitate an improvement in communication and understanding between oneself and a person or group with a differing perspective, by comparing and contrasting the differences and fostering mutual adaptation around them.
Example Sentences
- "Thus, they simultaneously worked the hyphens of their mutual existences, forming at times a balanced equation, at other times highlighting the knowledge and strengths of one particular author."
- "Outside the Gallaudet academic community, I have often, although not always, used two different long-standing interpreter-friends as my contact points at academic conferences and some academic social gatherings — helping me to work the hyphens between the hearing academic world and my own hard-of-hearing capabilities."
- "One of the ways to work the hyphens is through curricula that engage students in writing and inquiry using both students' multidialectal repertoires and the schools' literacies."
Etymology
Coined by Michelle Fine in her 1994 paper Working the hyphens: Reinventing the self and other in qualitative research, which was published in N. K. Denzin & Y.S.Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research; in reference to the grammatical use of hyphens to represent a unified form of two discrete concepts, such as in blue-green or hunter-gatherer.