a diplomatic suggestion made when the current topic of discussion is tangential, irrelevant, inappropriate, or suited for only a subset of those present, as in “Let’s take the org question offline, we want to make sure we cover all the operations issues by the end of this meeting”; makes the bewildering implication that the current conversation is ‘online’; in modern parlance offline denotes something disconnected from the internet, but this phrase has nothing to do with the specific mode of communication and is frequently used during face-to-face interactions, which are already offline in that sense; see also parking lot and off-table