The less said of the mouth-full-of-pebbles construction 'actionables', the better. This is not quite right, but 'action' can probably always be replaced with a more specific verb, such as 'reply' or 'fulfil', even if they sound less excitingly action-y. In his Dictionary of Weasel Words, the doyen of management-jargon mockery Don Watson defines 'to action' simply as 'do'.

Some people despise verbings (where a noun begins to be used as a verb) on principle, though who knows what they say instead of 'texting'. 2 Drill downįar be it from me to suggest that managers prefer metaphors that evoke huge pieces of phallic machinery, but why else say 'drill down' when you just mean 'look at in detail'? 3 Action It has the rhetorical virtue of wiping clean the slate of the past (perhaps because 'mistakes were made'), and implying a kind of thrustingly strategic progress, even though none is likely to be made as long as the working day is made up of funereal meetings where people say things like 'going forward'. Top of many people's hate list is this now-venerable way of saying 'from now on' or 'in future'.

Office jargon bingo