"marginal man" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It can be used to refer to someone who feels like they do not fully belong in either of two distinct cultures or societies. Example: He always felt like a marginal man, never quite fitting in with the traditional values of his family's culture or the modern beliefs of the society he now lived in.
Either way, one of us is always the marginal man, living in our adopted home country.
Blood-ties remain elusive, but at the level of imagination Sinclair is a son of Clare: a walker, a watcher, a marginal man.
The scrapes in bars, the trouble with the law, the scuffling life of a marginal man lost in a big city while dreaming big dreams, that Rouch reveals in workaday Abidjan are the counterpart to the Paris of "Breathless".
But knowing that the painter was a black freedman prompts one to speculate about the relationship between the solidly respectable sitter and the socially marginal man who immortalised him.
The boy regarded as a pariah in Brahmin society because of his mixed parentage becomes an impoverished immigrant in London, subject to racial and class prejudice, a marginal man trying to emulate the bohemian ways of his new friends.
Black-white teens are so rare today, the researchers argued, that they feel they have to engage in more risky behavior to be accepted by others: drink more, fight more, steal more, do illegal drugs more than either blacks or whites — a pattern of behavior known to social scientists as the "marginal man".
Most marginal men: rival anchormen Huw Edwards and Tom Bradby were largely absentees, merely reading bulletins rather than being entrusted with chairing formal debates or doing set-piece interviews.
"But they are all marginal men — wary until recently of being black, aspiring where possible to be white and subject to rejection and scorn on either hand".
But seafarers, those marginal men neither living nor dead, also became central to the English national project, to dreams of colonization and the shaping of a new form of civilization.
The American Army, in contrast, was a poorly equipped start-up operation made up of "former indentured servants; recent Irish immigrants; unemployed artisans; blacksmiths, and carpenters" — "a motley crew of marginal men and misfits, most wearing hunting shirts instead of uniforms".
The notion that a first-rate designer can emerge from the marginal world of men's wear and become one of the true fashion rebels worth watching anywhere is almost too remote to contemplate.
