divagating

Decades of increasingly bizarre and dangerous behavior have given the media ample opportunity to reduce Spector to a sick joke, although finding humor in the divagating hairstyles of a homicide defendant, as The New York Times 'Styles section did this Sunday, arguably shows as little respect for the deceased as it does for Spector.

Ken Emerson: The Wall of Sound and Egomania 2008

It has tactical value, too, since it makes those charged with insincerity defensive, divagating from the topic at hand.

Archive 2005-08-01 2005

It has tactical value, too, since it makes those charged with insincerity defensive, divagating from the topic at hand.

Dawg's Blawg 2005

Plus, 125 pages of footnotes, of the long, divagating kind that are half academic slap-fight, half Deep Bibliography, and half airy theorizing.

Kenneth Hite's Journal princeofcairo 2004

Pelagia smiled to herself; she could not have calculated how often she had heard her father divagating upon the absolute necessity and perfect reasonableness of having compulsory Italian in schools.

Captain Corelli's Mandolin De Bernieres, Louis 2003

And to this her curriculum recurred whether it had been divagating into history, geography, astronomy, English composition, or religious knowledge.

The Adventures of Harry Revel Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch 1903

We continued the subject, divagating as we went, and had a nice little sentimental conversation.

Simon the Jester William John Locke 1896

For a set scheduled to start at 10, the singer, who had spent much of the day divagating about what to wear onstage, appeared around midnight.

NYT > Home Page By GUY TREBAY 2010

What I mean are those ample, apparently open talks between people who have found each other out; who know the cardboard and lath and plaster of the architectural arrangements or suspect the water-supply and drainage behind; talks where one knows that the other is shirking some practical conclusion, divagating into the abstract, and has to pick his way among hidden interests and vanities, or avert his eyes from moral vistas which he knows of ....

Hortus Vitae Essays on the Gardening of Life Vernon Lee 1895