Psychiatric term for a speech pattern where puns and rhymes form the associating link between ideas. As an example the following patient was asked about how her health had been the preceding year:
"Yes I was dumb and numb then, but not deaf, I know Mrs Ida Teff, she is dead, probably an appendicitis; I don't know whether she lost her sight, sightless Hesse, His Highness of Hesse, sister Louise, His Highness of Baden.
This effect is found in mania, and also less frequently in schizophrenia.
I have been told that I have done this by psychiatric nurses. When I doing it I usually felt a general sense of playfulness and that i was messing around with language as a form of humour. Different people will produce more or less intelligible clang utterances too. From the inside there was a kind of manic excitement behind my desire to communicate, also, or a feeling of internal pressure which is eased by just shooting out a stream of phrases. I also had a feeling that I was conversing about life, the universe and everything rather than one delimited subject. It's not completely unreasoning speech either because you usually start with an idea of response to what's just been said to you. Someone who is tolerant and open minded about differences in self-expression can still have a conversation with you. Indeed is it really simply a spontaneous form of oral poetry that shouldn't justly be classed as pathological at all?