No wonder employees find it hard to understand company “leaders” (the new word for managers, apparently). The latest “BigExec-speak” I ran into this week:

• Action as a verb, as in, “We’ll action those areas.” Ugh.
• Criticality. I wasn’t sure exactly what it meant, but Dictionary.com came up with “the quality, state or degree of being of the highest importance” (or possibly, “The point at which a nuclear reaction is self-sustaining.”).
• Centricity. Again, I wasn’t sure, and couldn’t find it in my Canadian Oxford Dictionary. Dictionary.com could only tell me it was a noun but did not define it.
• Granularity. Don’t you find this one is gaining in popularity? It’s not in the Oxford but Dictionary.com says it’s a noun meaning “the quality of being composed of relatively large particles [syn: coarseness].” Wikipedia says “The granularity of data refers to the fineness with which data fields are sub-divided.”

While looking up the words, I checked Buzzwhack, which is always a source of amusement, and found these gems:

• Shoot ahead of the duck. Think ahead. Plan. You have to aim where you think the duck will be, not where it is when you pull the trigger.
• C-gull. A C-level executive (a company’s senior executive level: CEO, CFO, CIO, CMO) with the annoying habit of swooping in and out of meetings and leaving a huge mess for his/her subordinates to clean up.
• Mandals. Sandals worn by men, frequently without socks.

Maybe they’ll be candidates for the next round of new words added to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary or the Oxford English Dictionary.