Why “meandering” is a great word
Following a winding and turning course, like a river, or characterized by aimless or indirect wandering. From the verb 'meander', from Latin 'Maeander', from Ancient Greek 'Μαίανδρος' (Maíandros), the name of a winding river in Asia Minor (modern Turkey); the adjectival form 'meandering' is first recorded in English in the 1610s. Unlike “wandering,” which can be a simple lack of destination, or “straightforward,” a direct, linear march, “meandering” is the geometry of deliberate delay—the hypnotic loop of a river oxbow, the unplanned digression of an old man’s anecdote, the path of a bee heavy with pollen from bloom to bloom. It is motion that savours the delicious inefficiency of the journey, a quiet recognition that the longest way round may be the only way home.