Grimmer Girl here, I'm Vinyan Fogarty.

This week I have a quick and dirty tip about the word co-worker, another quick and dirty

tip about the term a bald face to lie, and a meaty middle about mixed metaphors.

Let's start with co-worker and its slippery hyphen.

The rules about hyphen are often more like guidelines.

You may need both a style guide and a good dictionary to get answers about hyphens, and

if you find yourself repeatedly looking up words, it helps to keep your own list of how

to write potentially hyphenated words.

The word that describes someone you work with is one of the words that can go either way.

Associated press writers, New York Times writers, and New Yorker writers go out to lunch

with their co-workers hyphenated.

Which Chicago Manual of Style Editors go to the co-op with their co-workers un-hyphenated.

But they do hyphenate co-op because of the 00.

I prefer the hyphen with co-worker because without it, I always initially think the word

is cow-workers.

The AP tends to defer to how words are used within their own industries though, and even

though they hyphenate co-worker, they don't hyphenate co-working because nobody in the

co-working industry hyphenates it.

An interesting way to think about hyphens is that they can both join words or word parts,

like they do with co-worker, and separate words, like they do when a long word falls at the

end of the line and you use a hyphen to break it apart.

Garner's Modern English usage says that British English is more accepting of hyphens than

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