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But the dictionary says that digress, a verb, means "to stray off of something, to wander from a path, or to turn aside, etc.". So when I say "blah blah blah, but I digress", it's like I'm saying "blah blah blah, but I stray off topic." So when I say that, do I mean:
In all of these instances, the phrase containing "but I digress" occurs in the context of an author who has caught himself going off on a tangent from the main point of the discussion. The observation comes after the fact of having digressed already and of continuing (at least until the moment of making the observation) to digress.
@user541686: Merriam-Webster seems to take the opposite view: that retrogress(ive) applies to a one-off situation where backward figurative movement—whether intended or not—occurs, but regress(ive) applies to a stepwise backward figurative movement, which implies a planned process.
I'd not use 'anyway', 'but I digress' or 'enough of that' in most contexts, as perhaps also hinting that the digression (which might have been at least as important as the main topic) was rather capricious. Unless I'm admitting I had been being a little self-indulgent. And I feel 'back to topic' has a flavour of 'I tend to be a little abstracted'.
You can use the word digress: leave the main subject temporarily in speech or writing. In your example, "I'm certain of it: the square root of 225 is 25," said Peter. But when Mary pulled out her phone and used the calculator app to find that it was in fact 15, Peter recoiled.
In addition to its prescriptive purpose, parenthetically may also be used in a more abstract sense, by definition: Set off within or as if within parentheses; qualifying or explanatory. It's worth noting that there is a difference between a parenthesis and parentheses, the former being a rhetoric device and the latter being punctuation ...
In a discussion, to go round in circles is to be purposelessly repetitious, whereas to go off on a tangent is to digress. A tangential point is a point that is peripheral to the main discussion, extending or diverging from it. An orthogonal point is a point that is addressing a different aspect of the matter independent of the main discussion.
After a class-wide tangent about the nature of... I haven't found the exact meaning of this word in dictionaries in this particular sentence
A definition that conveys the full range of the 'carry water' phrase's meaning, from pejorative to neutral, is this from OED: to be the lackey of; to do the bidding of; to serve the interests of. OED notes that the use is US colloquial, and chiefly political. Observe also that the first element of the tricolon in the definition, "to be the ...
This definition would seem to encompass pitches that are intentionally or accidentally thrown toward a batter's head and to pitches that strike or miss the batter's head (as long as they are in the vicinity of the player's head). Paul Dickson, The Dickson Baseball Dictionary (1989) has a lengthy entry for beanball, which includes this discussion: