Meaning & Examples:
On a sudden digression or change of course, as in
The professor's hard to follow; he's always off on a tangent.
This phrase often occurs in the idioms "fly off" or "go off on a tangent,"
as in
The witness was convincing until he went off on a tangent.
This expression alludes to the geometric tangent-a line or curve that
touches but does not intersect with another line or curve. [Second half of
1700s]
https://www.thefreedictionary.com [edited]
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Here's what I realized after all these years living in north America: going off
on a tangent is totally okay. Most talks are boring. Jokes and anecdotes are
appreciated during a lecture, especially on a dry subject. As they say: to
educate, one must entertain. It's a show. My students would've loved me if I
could tell light-hearted Garrison-Keillor-style stories when I taught a computer
security course 20 years ago. But bad for them, I was struggling with English
and too busy aping my Chinese grade-school math teachers.
