Woops!
Maybe that should have been "tangentialness", or maybe I was simply inadvertently letting the cat out of the bag.
The word "tangentialness" actually exists. I've found it in a couple of discussions of intellectual property and the law. Unlike "tangentiality, however, it simply doesn't sound right. On the other hand, it turns out that "tangentiality", at least according to Wikipedia, is:
a thought disorder shown from speech with a lack of observance to the main subject of discourse, such that a person whilst speaking on a topic deviates from the topic
So far perhaps not so good, but also not really so bad (and, I admit, pretty accurate). But it's what comes before then that's problematic. We learn that it's:
a physical symptom observed in speech that tends to occur in situations where a person is experiencing high anxiety, as a manifestation of the psychosis known as schizophrenia, in dementia or in states of delirium
I have my problems, but I wouldn't go quite that far!
Go to: Yeah, sure!, or
Go
to: Is that any way to write a Boidem column?, or
Go
to: How to read a Boidem column.