irrelevancy
nounEtymology From ir- + relevancy or irrelevant + -cy.
1
The quality of being irrelevant or inapplicable; lack of pertinence or connection.
2
A thing that is irrelevant—having no bearing on the subject of discussion.
- To believe that such talk really ever came out of people's mouths would be to believe that there was a time when time was of no value to a person who thought he had something to say; when it was the custom to spread a two-minute remark out to ten; when a man's mouth was a rolling-mill, and busied itself all day long in turning four-foot pigs of thought into thirty-foot bars of conversational railroad iron by attenuation; when subjects were seldom faithfully stuck to, but the talk wandered all around and arrived nowhere; when conversations consisted mainly of irrelevancies, with here and there a relevancy, a relevancy with an embarrassed look, as not being able to explain how it got there.1895, Mark Twain, Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences:
- "You've been and taken my Japanese umbrella." "I won't have him making an exhibition of himself," said Cripps, ignoring the irrelevancy.1913, Norman Lindsay, A Curate in Bohemia, Sydney: N.S.W. Bookstall Co., published 1932, page 102:
- Synonyms
- irrelevance
- Antonyms
- relevancy