tangent

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

"Some of them will run straight, some of them will not start at all, some of them will go off on a tangent or bite each other," she explained.

I didn’t have the good sense to note the context of my favorite opening tangents, or what day a particularly goofy segment aired.

In Ireland, the stories are almost never simple, and tend to involve seemingly irrelevant tangents and extended detours into the past.

But even as he veered into tangents and grievances, he continued to present himself as a threat to the establishment.