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It's cringe-inducing corporate speak, but given that it's also clear and comprehensible, yes, it's valid whether you want to be known as a person who encourages corporate-speak is a different question Bureaucratese -- esp.
So, yes, it works. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. This use of "action" as a verb is very common in business contexts, so it's very hard to argue it's invalid , but as both your reaction and Robusto's indicate, many people find it awkward, jarring or just plain ugly; for this reason you may wish to avoid using it although in an internal report in the sort of company where people talk like that, it would be entirely appropriate to do so Since escalating a problem is also an action, I'd hunt for a word or phrase that describes what the team did with or about those messages that were NOT escalated.
In the absence of a better choice, I'd use "resolved", or "handled". I would guess that "action" as a verb is a back-formation from " actionable ", which is a word a long history.
The formation would arise from this perfectly reasonable thought: if something is "actionable", that means you must be able to "action" it, right? However, action as a verb is not listed in any of the major published dictionaries I looked in, nor are there any examples of actioned in the Corpus of Contemporary American English.
Interestingly, in the Google ngram for 'actioned' , there was a large surge of usage in the midth century that dropped to a trickle until a new surge starting in the early s. Most of the 19th-century examples seem to be related to horses "Before dismissing the horse stock, we must not omit to notice a fine- actioned grey colt, bred by Lord Hastings" and guns "Patent double- actioned high-pressure sky-blue revolvers".
The best commonplace verb to replace actioned in this sense would probably be the good ol' utilitarian handled. It may not sound as exciting as tackled , but it's simply the fact rather than the embellishment. I also wouldn't recommend processed , although at first glance that seems a good substitute, because processed could simply mean filed or otherwise not really handled. One can process a form without taking a single action requested on the form. The difficulty with answering this question is that there are two different strands to it.
Actionable is a word with a respectable history, in both British and American English: unfortunately, in this sense it is a technical legal term, meaning "an action at law will lie". This is not the same as illegal , but is similar to tortious ; e.
There is another sense, 'able to be acted upon'. This is much more American than British, but is in the OED with citations from as opposed to for the legal sense. It is not much used formally because of the potential for confusion, but certainly can be taken as a basis for the back-formation of 'to action'. The word is, however, ugly and probably redundant: I have never seen a use that could not be better handled by act ; " of them were acted on by the team.
So you can reasonably defend yourself if accused of employing a non-existent word, but in practice it's probably better to find an alternative. I believe that this term might be a North American term, hence why it seems to be rejected by my spell checker.
I have used this term on one or two occasions, but I might have heard it used in some U. S programs over the years. I don't think actioned should be considered as a valid word, atleast that's my conclusion from the example you gave us. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.
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