tangent

To seriously consider the answers to these questions would require Penelope to do something called “going off on a tangent,” which is another way of saying “to stray from the subject at hand.”

And my oldest students were swept away into the mysteries of sine, cosine, and tangents.

At the same time, it was telling that a common reaction to Landry’s tangent was:

The tangents, the idiosyncrasies of the hosts and the glimpses of private life leave listeners feeling connected.

They are deployed for pauses and interruptions in speech; they precede bursts of exposition, neat summings-up and lengthy tangents.