Playing with words is fun! Wright?! Clang associations are pretty much a daily funny for me. Essentially as I’m reading something, or watching something, or thinking about something a particular word stands out among the others. That word seems to make an indelible impression on my thoughts for the next few hours (read weeks). You could call it an obsession, I guess.
The dancing I’ll have with a single word is epic. Inside I’m cracking myself up at how it can be transformed and manipulated. And then the hysterical inside laugh comes: making that word play with other words.
World. Whirled. Inferred.
So those are all related to ‘world’. The world, whirls. I infer this about the world. See? Related. Except they’re not. At all. This is why I usually catch myself doing this: you look proper crazy when interjecting with a clang association. These are associations that are similar sounding, perhaps rhyming, that are grouped together but have no logical reason to be.
In fact, if you were to interject aloud with random clang association you might be mistaken as being trollied or on something. Am I tired of being accused of being either drunk or high (which I was, at a time..)… That’s a story for another day. But I get it, speaking words that are not logically related and have no context in the conversation you’re having would give people that impression.
Clang associations are, according to my limited knowledge of the illness, quite typical of ‘thought disorders’, like schizophrenia. Bipolar mania presents a lot like schizophrenia IMO. Mania so severe it could perhaps reach the point of psychosis. Medical literature1, that I forgot to bookmark and can’t be asked to find at this juncture, uses the term ‘glossomania’ which describes alterations in thought and speech that result in a distinctive linguistic style typical of psychosis in bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.
Confirmed. Concord. Coke.
Clang associations could easily be mistaken for creative poetry since they are often similar sounding or rhyming. The difference is that poetry uses words that are related to the poem’s intent or subject, rather than somma for the sake of having a rhyming couplet.
IIRC, the ‘clang association’ is one of the features of what is commonly called ‘word salad’1. The proper term is schizophasia. Again, this is a (severe) language disturbance that is a feature of schizophrenia. A person is said to have schizophasia when their speech is jumbled, repetitious, and simply doesn’t make sense.
You can see now why it’s easy to confuse this with being on drugs or drunk. It’s shit to be so accused when you aren’t. Just saying.
Schizophasia even presents as neologisms: made up words or expressions. Again totally nonsensical to the observer. A persons voice may even sound “flat” or nasal or some other unusual tone or inflection. When I’m clanging, which I do with my inside voice, my recall of vocabulary that would usually be second nature is poor. Then when I do remember them I use them out of context or incorrectly. All this is strictly called “schizophasia”.
What interested me most about the research I forgot to bookmark was that schizophasia also resulted in the paranoid, psychotic bipolar sample (and the schizophrenic one) using written word with as much discordance as done in speech (did I use ‘discordance’ incorrectly? Or am I just paranoid…). Not only were sentences improperly structured, but the words in those sentences were misspelled with similar sounding replacement letters.
All of the above might make you think your memory is going. That you’re losing it. You probably are. You’re likely heading for mania. Or at least I am. It’s good to know this so you’re able to do something about it.
So why am I writing this post? Mistake. Opaque. Jacques.
Feature Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay
1 Mouton, De Gruyter (1993). Glossomania and Glossolalia in Schizophasia and their Linguistic Kinships to the Jargonaphasias. In G. Blunken et al (Eds.), Linguistic Disorders and Pathologies: An International Handbook (pp. 543 – 549). De Gruyter Mouton.
