work the hyphens
work the hyphens 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.
Verb
work the hyphens (third-person singular simple present works the hyphens, present participle working the hyphens, simple past and past participle worked the hyphens)
- 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.
- 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.2000, Judith Glazer-Raymo, Estela Mara Bensimon, Barbara K. Townsend, Women in Higher Education: A Feminist Perspective, page 268
- 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...2004, Bonnie G. Smith, Beth Hutchison, Gendering Disability, page 61
Forms of work the hyphens
| third-person singular present | works the hyphens |
|---|---|
| present participle | working the hyphens |
| past participle | worked the hyphens |
| past | worked the hyphens |
Origin of work the hyphens
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.
Questions about work the hyphens
- What does work the hyphens mean?
- Work the hyphens 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.
- What part of speech is work the hyphens?
- Work the hyphens is a verb.
- What is the past tense of work the hyphens?
- The past tense of work the hyphens is worked the hyphens.
Words near work the hyphens in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: work the hyphens (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “work the hyphens.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/work_the_hyphens. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.