Word Fixations

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Heidi has decided

"Pumpkin"

and

"Underwear"

are the most fascinating words in the English language. These days most conversations with her include "Pumpkin" or "Underwear" shouted out at least once.

Is kind of frustrating if I'm trying to get her to request something or respond to a question.

Could this be a verbal stim?

She usually follows saying one or the other word with hysterical laughter.

i had a student whose favorite word was spaghetti....the more people laughed, the more he said it.

I'm mostly ignoring the random PUMPKIN! or UNDERWEAR! in her discussions.

Didn't know if that was the right choice to make.

Heidi's oral sensory needs have increased recently so maybe the words satisfy some oral craving she is having. The P's in pumpkin certainly can pop if you say them enough.

My 7 y.o. grandson loves to say "hippo" and "pickle." He just randomly says them, "because he likes to." We can't really figure out why, and it seems like a verbal stim. He otherwise speaks fairly normally.

I have a number fixation, really.

Number 32.

I flip knifes, tv remotes, anything to the number 32.

*Shifty eyes*

And I also have my odd trigger words. Often it's fiddlesticks *Sneaky look around*

Regards
GM

I used to have word fixations, and still do but not nearly as bad as it was when I was a kid. I remember how annoyed my mother was with my little quirks

Chutney... Aubergine

Think this is fairly common, some syllables just hit the spot. If repeating them over and over for a lengthy stint, would constitute a verbal tic.

The words that always make me laugh are orifice and edifice, I don't really know why

I get fascinated by names. My current favorite for boys is Roger and for girls, it is Katherine.

I used to do this. Still do. When I was a kid, certain words/nonsense words repeated in this way would drive my father furious and he'd yell and threaten to make me stop. (The threat being that if I didn't stop the babbling he'd give me baby-food for every meal.) This did not improve my relationship with my dad, and didn't stop me doing that general behavior either. At his demand, I'd switch to some other sound and do it more quietly. Which is what would happen eventually anyway.

My inexpert advice would be to not worry about "pumpkin" and "underwear" but encourage her to say these things more quietly, and not interject them inappropriately into conversation.

For several years in my early teens I was utterly dependant on reciting the entirety of Jabberwocky before I could perform parts in plays or deliver oral reports. I'd whisper it almost inaudibly at super-speed, it was like a boot-sequence for other verbal functions. I'm quite good at public speaking but never would have mastered it without Jabberwocky. I had another that I used as a 'calm down!' signal for my own brain, it was to whisper the words for rattlesnake in French, Spanish, and German, then the English "Rattlesnake!" ended the sequence. It disturbed people, no doubt because the topic of rattlesnakes does, though for me it had squat to do with snakes and was all about the pattern of sounds.

Yeah encourage her to say it quietly. The word "satisfaction" at one time was a hot one for me.

Quietly is a good idea.

She was telling everyone this morning that Uncle D has silly Donkey Underpants.

Donkey seems to be a new word that has entered the mix.

Might do some whispering games around those words.

Uncle D. Has silly donkey underpants.
They grow on frilly honky-tonky pumpkin-plants
and don't fit him; they're sized for elephants.

Whispering games sound good. My partner likes to echo the nonsense words I say at random. I find this pleasing and would probably come to habitually whisper them if he echoed only quiet ones, quietly.

Possibly it might help to also have a certain time of day set aside for saying those favourite words loudly, and getting approval (you laugh too) for it. Of course your child is not a parrot, but this is a totally parroty-behavior and the way to get pet parrots to stop shouting all the time is to shout with them for a few minutes a day and give soft responses to soft-volume vocalizations the rest of the time, ignoring the too-loud ones. Parrots do this for what is surely a completely different reason, but that sort of thing works for me. There have been several times in my life when I scheduled daily sessions of doing something weird and annoying (that people here would describe as a "stim" I guess) very intensely for a short period, in private, in order to make it so I wouldn't feel the urge to do it in public.

as crazy as it may sound, your job is to figure out why its funny TO HER.

Her associations are probably a bit more than the words mean to anybody else.

Those two associations together could be utterly hilarious to her; like the joke that everytime she thinks it it picks her up.

to put it another way, theres a neural circuit x and neural circuit Y and shes liking that circuit and building a highway there.

It her mind. Let her build.

I used to have word fixations when I was a kid... brand names in particular, like "Clorox" and "Ziploc." I don't know why. It faded as I got older though.

They usually do fade as you get older, or sometimes you find others that replace it!