tangential

• The best parts of my intellectual life are tangential, in areas outside my expertise. —  Speaker for the Dead
• He was on the verge of bringing up Maestra's missing-link theory and maybe a word or two about T.day Is T.morrow when it occurred to him that he'd gone tangential, which was accepted, even expected, at a C.R.A.F.T. Club donnybrook but generally unappreciated in ordinary company. —  Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates
• Her first appointment of the day had been with a shrivelledlooking man called Mr Taylor, who explained at great length and with much historical detail - a great deal of which seemed somewhat tangential, which is saying something when you're working in a legal context - that he wished to sue the council because it had taken them three years to mend a broken gutter-pipe around the roof of his house. —  Country of the Blind
• He felt a kind of tangential dislocation of time or space, and he had the eerie sensation that the two of them had somehow become locked in tandem, one engine, its power increasing geometrically, and he was immediately uneasy. —  Black Blade
• Koestler, therefore, deserves to be openly chastised for misusing his considerable intellectual talents and devoting them to such a peripheral theory bordering on fantastic speculation, a tangential issue in Jewish history even in its heyday a generation or so ago. —  Appointment in Khazaria

Roget's II: The New Thesaurus

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