Not every tangent Jacobson follows is particularly illuminating, as he is the first to admit.
His conversation when he does not fly off at a tangent is full of pith and idea.
But, look out, fellow strollers, for we are off in a tangent!
The mere thought of the hospital sent her mind flying off at a tangent.
There wasn't a half mile of tangent at a single stretch in the whole of it.
The complement of the logarithm of a sine, tangent, or secant.
Or thus: if it be perpendicular to the tangent, it is a diameter by the touch point: Schoner.
A tangent is but one onely in that point of the periphery Schoner.
For otherwise a tangent were not on the same part one onely and no more.
A line drawn from the centre of a circle to the extremity of the tangent.
1590s, "meeting at a point without intersecting," from Latin tangentem (nominative tangens), present participle of tangere "to touch," from PIE root *tag- "to touch, to handle" (cf. Latin tactus "touch," Greek tetagon "having seized," Old English þaccian "stroke, strike gently"). First used by Danish mathematician Thomas Fincke in "Geomietria Rotundi" (1583). Extended sense of "slightly connected with a subject" is first recorded 1825. The noun also is attested from 1590s.
