Both Uses of
tangential
in
Looking for Alaska
- She smoked and talked and ate for an hour without stopping, and I scribbled in my notebook as the muddy waters of tangents and cosines began to clarify.†
p. 52.2 *
- Now, back to tangents.†
p. 52.5
Definitions:
-
(1)
(tangential as in: tangential to our discussion) a topic with little or no connection to the main subject
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
In math, tangential means touching at only a single point.