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Digressive   Listen
Digressive

adjective
1.
Of superficial relevance if any.  Synonym: tangential.  "A tangential remark"
2.
(of e.g. speech and writing) tending to depart from the main point or cover a wide range of subjects.  Synonyms: discursive, excursive, rambling.  "A rambling discursive book" , "His excursive remarks" , "A rambling speech about this and that"






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"Digressive" Quotes from Famous Books



... reflections and striking allusions, a wilderness of thought, in which the fertility of fancy scatters flowers of every hue and of every odour. This is one of the few poems in which blank verse could not be changed for rhyme but with disadvantage. The wild diffusion of the sentiments and the digressive sallies of imagination would have been compressed and restrained by confinement to rhyme. The excellence of this work is not exactness but copiousness; particular lines are not to be regarded; the power is in the whole, and in the whole there is a magnificence like that ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson

... keep their sentences straight, and to avoid the tangle of parentheses, long or short. Here, again, Mr Spurgeon gives me an admirable illustration. His sentences, never thin or weak in matter, are always straight. If any of my younger Brethren are tempted, as I confess I am, in the digressive direction, I would recommend them (if they usually preach without writing) to write a sermon now and then, and rigorously to exclude, or re-write, all sentences which transgress. It occurred to me recently, when acting as a summer chaplain in Switzerland, ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule

... painful contusion, although the air continues full of stones, Mr. BUMSTEAD takes JOHN MCLAUGHLIN'S arm, as they move onward, to protect the old man from harm, and is so careful to pick out the choice parts of the road for him that their progress is digressive in ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 13, June 25, 1870 • Various

... immediately." And Mrs. Callender stamped her foot, grew red in the face, and exhibited sundry other symptoms of towering passion. Becky instantly obeyed the order so peremptorily given; and, while she is doing so, we may throw in a digressive word or two, by the way of more fully enlightening the reader regarding the turn which matters seemed now about to take. Be it known to him, then, that the demand for the jelly pot, which was now about to be made on Mrs. Anderson, was not ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various

... railway-reading, nor to clergymen for the entertainment of sewing-bees, nor to the devourer of novels, in whose life the fiction that must be read at one sitting forms an epoch. It is a good vade-mecum for a voyage round either Cape; its digressive character suits the listless mood of the sea-goer, and he can drop, we will not say the thread, but the entanglement, in whatever ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various



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