(a.) Jumping, or passing, from one thing or subject to another, without order or rational connection; without logical sequence; disconnected; immethodical; aimless; as, desultory minds.
(a.) Out of course; by the way; as a digression; not connected with the subject; as, a desultory remark.
Example Sentences:
(1) Senior figures in the yes campaign were predicting a 60%-to-40% defeat on a desultory turnout, with one admitting: "We were providing a solution to a problem the British public did not recognise."
(2) Andy Burnham Burnham, or at least the Andy Burnham campaign, was making desultory calls on Thursday to test out Labour MPs to see if they were interested in serving in a Burnham shadow cabinet.
(3) A few desultory bands followed, performing an assortment of leftwing songs from various historical leftwing movements.
(4) This came as no real surprise to me; through my desultory use of Facebook over the years I have somehow accrued 362 "friends".
(5) Others surf the internet, update their blogs; make desultory notes; look at each others' notes.
(6) Cafes and restaurants typically close around dusk, with custom desultory and staff eager to get home early on less frequent public transport.
(7) The state was shocked with weapons, money, foreign troops and aid but with little oversight or accountability the results from a long occupation and massive amounts of foreign aid have been desultory.
(8) Nor did he shed any light on how he believed the decision may affect the desultory negotiating process with Tripoli that the UN and the Russians are trying, so far without much success, to advance.
(9) Except for scalp hair and desultory areas of sexual hair, most of man's hair follicles are vestigial.
(10) Bin Laden did describe the obtaining of chemical weapons as a religious duty, and al-Qaida and offshoots did make desultory efforts to build laboratories in Afghanistan and in northern Iraq .
(11) The yes camp, urged on by Clegg, secured a desultory 32.1%.
(12) But there’s a lot of toffs round here, I reckon they’ll get in again because of that.” Though even Clegg will admit victory is “a mountain to climb”, a close second, up from fourth in 2015, would help the Lib Dems test their messaging to Tory voters in preparation for seats they might be more able to win, particularly in the south-west, though the polls for the party nationally remain at a stubborn and desultory 8%.
(13) The series of general frequency shows: driveling 67.9%, desultory thinking 57.3%, withdrawal, broadcasting, insertion 32.7%, loosening of association, gaps, derailment 28.9%, blocking 16.5%, transitoriness, movielike thinking, double-sense thinking 12.0%.
(14) After a rather desultory attempt to overrun the supposed adversary, they discovered that he had claws.
(15) Against this desultory backdrop, it is instructive to note that in policy circles, EPR also stands for Extended Producer Responsibility , the concept that the manufacturer of a smartphone, for example, should be responsible for recycling the handset when discarded.
(16) The military historian and former US marine corps colonel Bing West describes these desultory battles as " groundhog wars ".
(17) In the nonobese group, normal subjects responded to massive hyperglycemia after rapid injection of glucose with immediate and maximal outpouring of insulin, in contrast to a desultory insulinogenic response in patients with mild diabetes, and no initial response at all in moderate diabetics.
(18) The Guardian's report today tells the story of volunteers who were made to pay for their own equipment and weapons, given desultory basic training, then patronised or ignored.
(19) And sometimes, in practice, things can be very desultory indeed.
(20) There are no precise figures of how many Jews left France in 2014, since France does not collect census information regarding religion and is surprisingly desultory about data regarding emigration, but it is probably in the region of around 2% of the overall Jewish population, a huge increase on all previous years.
Digression
Definition:
(n.) The act of digressing or deviating, esp. from the main subject of a discourse; hence, a part of a discourse deviating from its main design or subject.
(n.) A turning aside from the right path; transgression; offense.
(n.) The elongation, or angular distance from the sun; -- said chiefly of the inferior planets.
Example Sentences:
(1) How World of Warcraft train future soldiers One odder digression sees the two discussing whether or not MMORPGs, video games like World of Warcraft, are evil.
(2) Bilaterals in summit seasons can be stiff exchanges, where digressions can carry risks: not enough said, too much said.
(3) Discrepancies increase when moderate digressions from the adopted implant system rules are allowed, such as could commonly occur clinically.
(4) Her only digression from a rather set, humdrum routine came when in 1975 she divorced her husband and then two years later remarried him.
(5) It's the first interview he's done since his marriage and divorce and the split-up of the Ordinary Boys, and it all comes rushing out in a spate, a tangle of chronological confusions and jokes, and groans when I quote some of his old interviews back at him, and statements of contrition, and digressions about Dawkins or whatever, and here's the confounding thing - he's really nothing like I was expecting, not indie-boy sulky, or attempting to play it cool, he's just talkative and engaging, and he has a sense of humour about himself that, from reading his previous interviews, I wouldn't have even guessed at.
(6) Despite that initial exposure to sports commentary, Healey took a digression into the music industry in the early 90s, as a tour manager for various "shoegazing" bands, before a chance break landed him in the US as an alt rock DJ and ultimately as the voice of New England Revolution, before ESPN came calling.
(7) The PPI is but the ratio G1 cells to total 2C cells (or G2 to 4C cells, when cells also digress from the post-replicative stage of the cycle).
(8) That is why its tempo is so explicit with slowness, syncopated with digression.
(9) The paper digresses on events leading to anachronistic acquisition of immortal growth by normally dependent cells as well as on the time and path dependent incidence of cancer, in vivo.
(10) Comprehensive evaluation of work conditions of workers of different occupational groups (bulldozer, excavator and boring machine operators, embroideresses) helped create a new parameter of occupation harmfulness evaluation: mean arithmetic value and root-mean-square digression.
(11) Eleven studies were found that did not contain obvious digressions from several methodologic assessment criteria (adapted from the McMaster guidelines for the evaluation of clinical trials).
(12) But I digress in precisely the sort of way you would expect from someone shaped by a lifetime's exposure to Attenborough programmes.
(13) Since his meander to China becomes a superb digression into the Anglo-Chinese opium wars, perhaps it doesn't matter that he made the train thing up.
(14) Hugo's form, predicated on length, on digression and detail, is a deliberate accretion of overlapping examples: his scenes are all variations on the same theme.
(15) We only go along with the book's violence because there are the safety valves of unreliability and chapter-long digressions about Whitney Houston .
(16) In vitro comparisons indicated that although neither instrument accurately recorded intraocular pressure (IOP), compared with manometric measurements, results of both instruments indicated linear digression from manometric IOP values that could readily be corrected, thereby accurately estimating IOP in horses.
(17) After a brief digression on the etiopathogenesis of carbon monoxide poisoning, the paper underlines the importance of the timely use of hyperbaric oxygen treatment not only to impede the immediate effects of CO, but also to reduce the incidence of neurological complications.
(18) In Sebald, Norfolk is never the focus but rather the beginning of a digression.
(19) diGRESS-tiGRESS, in which digress is a real word, and DIgress-Tigress, in which tigress is a real word).
(20) I speak from the brain but I also speak from the heart,” he said, rambling like a rich know-it-all uncle – “I’m bringing back the jobs from China!” – with brief digressions into self-pity: “Macy’s was very disloyal to me.