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Wayne P. Tanner looked gloomily over the rim of his coffee cup at the rows of snowcrusted trucks parked outside the diner. He hated the snow but, more than that, he hated being caught out. And in the space of just a few hours it had happened twice.

Those New York state troopers had enjoyed every minute of it, smug Yankee bastards. He had seen them slide up behind him and hang there on his tail for a couple of miles, knowing damn well he’d seen them and enjoying it. Then the lights coming on, telling him to pull over and the smartass, no more than a kid, swaggering up alongside in his Stetson like some goddamn movie cop. He’d asked for the daily logbook and Wayne found it, handed it down and watched as the kid read it.

“Atlanta huh?” he said, flipping the pages.

“Yes sir,” Wayne replied. “And it’s one helluva lot warmer down there, I can tell you.” The tone usually worked with cops, respectful but fraternal, implying some working kinship of the road. But the kid didn’t look up.

From The Horse Whisperer, Nicholas Evans (1950–2022), Delacourt Press 1995

Context: Note that Wayne is a truck driver who just got stopped by a young police officer (which Wayne calls as the kid.)

I do not understand the meaning of the phrase in bold. I have looked up the word kinship in Merriam-Webster and it says

the quality or state of being kin : relationship

That definition wasn't very helpful, so I looked up kin and it said:

  1. a group of persons of common ancestry : clan

So, I understand that kinship is something you share with people but the meaning of the phrase in bold still doesn't make sense to me.

What does working in "working kinship" mean?
What does working kinship of the road mean?

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  • What the two comments above imply is that 'working kinship' isn't a term (when it would be an open compound or close connotation) or even a loose connotation. c 800 hits in a Google search for ["working kinship" -carers] (ruling out the term 'kinship carers') shows that indeed, this is just a free combination of 'kinship', and the participial adjective 'working' used attributively. Commented 14 hours ago
  • Ok. What does working kinship mean? Commented 13 hours ago
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    @FayyazKhan A feeling of family membership or closeness as a result of similar occupational experiences. Commented 13 hours ago
  • @FayyazKhan next time a question of yours, without any research, gets migrated to ELL, I will close it and it will automatically be sent back to EL&U. But if you show why you do not understand the phrase, users will be more sympathetic to your problem, and they will post answers instead of commenting. Commented 9 hours ago
  • When an extensive edit has addressed the issues raised in comments, those comments are no longer needed. There is now the context, and dictionary definitions of kin and kinship. Further comments explaining what the phrase means will be deleted on sight. Please post answers. Commented 9 hours ago

3 Answers 3

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The Highway Patrol and the Truck Driver both work on the road(s). Wynne (the trucker) has supposedly phrased his words to encourage some camaraderie with the inexperienced cop, due to their shared workplace.

Cambridge Dictionary gives this meaning (among others):

kinship
a feeling of being close or similar to other people or things:
He felt a real sense of kinship with his fellow soldiers.

So I understand the phrase working kinship to mean something like a working relationship, that is, related to their common workplace, although 'kinship' sounds more familiar or friendly. The trucker is trying to imply that they are both on the same team, on the same side.

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This is just literary writing that describes a relationship between a cop and a truck driver.

a family relationship of any kind means you have kinship with this or that person or persons.

If this is a working kinship, it is not a real family kinship.

The kinship is one based on the work they do: One is a cop and the other is a driver. Their work on the road is what gives them a working relationship which the author is comparing to family.

of the road here means from driving: both cops and truckers are always driving.

So: a working kinship of the road.

means
A relationship of a family type that comes from the fact we both work on the road.

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It isn't a recognised idiom, but it feels familiar to native speakers because the phrase is constructed from other idiomatic terms.

Let's break it down:

"Working kinship" - we'd normally say working relationship, to mean a professional connection that is for mutual benefit. "Kinship" is more familial than "relationship", but it follows the implication of fraternity, which means brotherly relationships between males. This "working kinship" implies an unwritten agreement, or unspoken code of conduct, between policemen and other males.

"...of the road" - when referring to such unspoken codes, it is common to label them to indicate the scope, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively; for example, "code of honour", "law of the playground". I'm not completely sure if "of the road" is literal, meaning it is between drivers and traffic cops, or if it is figurative in the way that "the streets" is sometimes used to indicate it applies to common people.

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