desultory
adjective

- lacking a plan, purpose, or enthusiasm

- without a clear plan or purpose and showing little effort or interest

- lacking in consistency, constancy, or visible order, disconnected

Cambridge Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, Collins Dictionary

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WORD ORIGIN



The adjective "desultory" derives from the Latin word desultorius, which means "jumping from one thing to another" or "skipping about." This Latin term is related to desultor, which referred to a circus performer who would leap from one horse to another while they were in motion.

The root desul- comes from the Latin verb desilire, which means "to leap down" or "to jump off”, formed from de- (down, from) + salire (to leap, jump).

Desultory entered English in the late 16th century, retaining its sense of jumping or leaping from one thing to another. Over time, it evolved to describe actions, speech, or thoughts that move randomly from one subject to another without logical connection, or something performed in a hasty, disconnected, or random manner.

Today, desultory typically describes something that lacks a plan, purpose, or enthusiasm, often characterized as random, disconnected, or jumping from one thing to another without a clear pattern or purpose.

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CHASING BUTTERFLIES

Some of history’s most brilliant minds were anything but linear thinkers. Albert Einstein often interrupted his physics work to play violin. Agatha Christie would leave her mysteries mid-sentence to join her husband on archaeological digs. Richard Feynman bounced between physics, playing bongo drums, and studying Mayan mathematics.

Today, we glorify focus and efficiency. Productivity apps promise to eliminate distraction. Workflows are optimized to minimize mental drift. But in doing so, we may be shutting the door on creativity. Research shows that our best ideas often arise not when we’re concentrating, but when our minds are elsewhere—wandering.

This isn’t accidental. Desultory thinking—moving freely across subjects—creates unexpected collisions between ideas. Those collisions are the raw material of innovation. Steve Jobs famously credited a random calligraphy course he once took as the inspiration behind Apple’s revolutionary approach to typography. It wasn’t part of a plan; it was a detour.

The takeaway isn’t to abandon discipline. But we should rethink our aversion to digression. Not every project needs to be finished to be valuable. Not every path needs to lead somewhere obvious. Some of the most valuable ideas emerge from the things we start without a clear intention to complete.

Innovation doesn’t always follow a straight line. Neither do the people behind it.

Helga & Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

a leaf in the wind, adrift, aimless, all over the map (the place), arbitrary, bouncing around, capricious, casual, chaotic, chasing butterflies, cloud-chasing, cursory, DESULTORY, digressive, directionless, disconnected, discursive, disorganized, dispersed, erratic, fickle, fluctuating, fragmented, haphazard, helter-skelter, inconsistent, inconstant, jumbled, jumping from one thing to another, lacking focus, meandering, nonlinear, off-and-on, purposeless, rambling, random, scatterbrained, skipping around, sporadic, unconnected, undirected, unfocused, unplanned, unpredictable, unpremeditated, unstructured, wandering, without direction, zigzagging

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SMUGGLE OWAD into an English conversation today, say something like:

“Our DESULTORY discussions are interesting, for while,… then the martinet in me starts pointing at the clock.”

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P L E A S E   S U P P O R T   O W A D

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