One person, working on multiple careers

Before one of my editors sent me an article on "slash careers", I had known only the Hollywood jargon of "hyphenate" to help describe someone holding concurrent multiple jobs.

Actually, the choice between "slash" and "hyphen" has always confounded me. Say, in the form of writing dates, Americans seem to go with hyphens, as in 03-09-2016, while Europeans prefer the slash, such as 09/03/2016, with the day and month reversed. The Chinese order is of course year, month, day, but most of us probably use dots for the punctuation.

I guess a hyphenate tends to be someone who holds more than one job in the same field. George Clooney is a producer-director-actor. And many of my colleagues are reporter-editors, going out on assignments one week and staying in the office to do a page the next.