Non Sequitur (logic) - Non Sequitur in Everyday Speech

Non Sequitur in Everyday Speech

See also: Derailment (thought disorder)

In everyday speech, a non sequitur is a statement in which the final part is totally unrelated to the first part, for example:

Life is life and fun is fun, but it's all so quiet when the goldfish die. —West with the Night, Beryl Markham

It can also refer to a response that is totally unrelated to the original statement or question:

Mary: I wonder how Mrs. Knowles next door is doing.
Jim: Did you hear that the convenience store two blocks over got robbed last night? Thieves got away with a small fortune.

Read more about this topic:  Non Sequitur (logic)

Famous quotes containing the words everyday and/or speech:

    Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains full of travelers, cafés full of customers, parks full of promenaders, consulting-rooms of famous doctors full of patients, theatres full of spectators, and beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now begins to be an everyday one, namely, to find room.
    José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)

    Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention. The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.
    John Dos Passos (1896–1970)