All 8 Uses of
irrelevant
in
Crime and Punishment, by Dostoyevsky
- But to be stopped on the stairs, to be forced to listen to her trivial, irrelevant gossip, to pestering demands for payment, threats and complaints, and to rack his brains for excuses, to prevaricate, to lie—no, rather than that, he would creep down the stairs like a cat and slip out unseen.†
Chpt 1.1irrelevant = not relevant (not related to the subject being considered, or not important enough to want to consider)
- His mind was even occupied by irrelevant matters, but by nothing for long.†
Chpt 1.6 *
- He was afraid of losing his self-control; he tried to catch at something and fix his mind on it, something quite irrelevant, but he could not succeed in this at all.†
Chpt 2.1
- It is quite the contrary, an observation apropos of the style occurred to me that is by no means irrelevant as things stand.†
Chpt 3.3
- One sudden irrelevant idea almost made him laugh.†
Chpt 3.6
- I believe it's a sort of legal rule, a sort of legal tradition—for all investigating lawyers—to begin their attack from afar, with a trivial, or at least an irrelevant subject, so as to encourage, or rather, to divert the man they are cross-examining, to disarm his caution and then all at once to give him an unexpected knock-down blow with some fatal question.†
Chpt 4.5
- Every prisoner on trial, even the rudest peasant, knows that they begin by disarming him with irrelevant questions (as you so happily put it) and then deal him a knock-down blow, he-he-he!†
Chpt 4.5
- The decrepit father was wheeled in to see Svidrigailov by the tender and sensible mother, who as usual began the conversation with various irrelevant questions.†
Chpt 6.6