readline weirdness in octave

Readline in Octave (on Linux at least) is a little different than 
readline functionality for everything else, in that it seems to be doing 
a search on up- and down-arrows. If I type a partial command at, say, a 
bash prompt, and then hit up-arrow, it just switches to the previous 
command. In Octave, it searches to a previous command starting with what 
I typed so far---which is great for the nimble-fingered, but doesn't 
work that well for the fat-fingered rest of us: for example, I often try 
to hit an up-arrow on an empty line, miss it so that  I get some garbage 
chars like ~, and then the up-arrow doesn't work until I manually delete 
those extra chars.

Similarly, after mistyping a command, and up-arrowing it to make 
corrections,  typing anything, including left- and right-arrows, locks 
readline into search mode: for instance

bad1

bad2

and typing up-arrow returns bad2 and then bad1, but if you type a 
left-arrow first followed by right-arrow, up-arrow no longer works, 
probably because it searches for bad2.

This behavior is hard to describe because there's no feedback as to what 
is it searching for and when---which is why I would rather turn it off 
if possible---Is there a way to do it?