Idiom
non sequitur
Meaning
A conclusion or remark that does not follow from what came before.
Examples
“We were discussing the budget and he asked about the weather — a total non sequitur.”
“The argument opens well and then ends in a non sequitur: nothing in the first three pages supports the recommendation on the fourth.”
“The speech was a chain of non sequiturs held together by tone alone, and it worked on the night for exactly that reason — the audience was following the confidence rather than the reasoning.”
Examples
simple
“We were discussing the budget and he asked about the weather — a total non sequitur.”
contextual
“The argument opens well and then ends in a non sequitur: nothing in the first three pages supports the recommendation on the fourth.”
complex
“The speech was a chain of non sequiturs held together by tone alone, and it worked on the night for exactly that reason — the audience was following the confidence rather than the reasoning.”
Origin
Non sequitur is a complete Latin sentence: it does not follow. Roman writers on rhetoric used it as a technical verdict, marking the place where an argument's conclusion has stopped being supported by its premises — the Latin equivalent of the Greek logical vocabulary they had inherited.
English borrowed it in the sixteenth century with that strict meaning intact, and formal logic still uses it that way. Every named fallacy is a species of non sequitur.
Ordinary English then loosened it. A non sequitur is now just as often a remark with no visible connection to the conversation it lands in — not a broken argument, just a sentence that arrived from somewhere else.
Stories
The Poets' Latin · See all Roman origin
Horace, Virgil and Cicero, still quoted in the original.
carpe diem — Seize the day — make use of today rather than counting on tomorrow.
tempus fugit — Time flies — said when far more of it has gone than you expected.
memento mori — A reminder that you are going to die, and that this should change how you spend the time.
in vino veritas — People say what they actually think once they have had a drink.
festina lente — Make haste slowly — move quickly, but never faster than you can do it properly.
to err is human — Making mistakes is part of being a person, so a mistake alone is not a scandal.
- Level
- C1 · Advanced
- Updated