Etymology

work the hyphens

Today it means: 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. Full definition →

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The story

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.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.