Clangass
Rockstar
Nickelback
Nickelback - Rockstar
[OFFICIAL VIDEO]
190,494,755 views
Clang association, also known as clanging, is a speech pattern where people put words together because of how they sound instead of what they mean.
Clanging usually involves strings of rhyming words, but it may also incorporate puns (words with double meanings), similar-sounding words, or alliteration (words beginning with the same sound).
Sentences containing clang associations have interesting sounds, but they don’t make sense. People who speak in these repetitive, incoherent clang associations usually have a mental health condition.
| ||
What came before? In 1982, I dropped out of academia for four years, and I began working as a fulltime writer in, of all places, Lynchburg, Virginia. I had plenty of time to spare, and I began documenting my life with physical scrapbooks. It was the pre-computer age. I’d type my thoughts and letters onto pieces of paper and paste the papers, or Xeroxes of them, into a large ledger book.
When I’d filled a ledger, that would mark the end of an era, and then I’d buy a fresh ledger at a stationery store. The scrapbook journals held writing notes, letters, drawings, handbills, reviews, and a few photos. I made three of these scrapbooks.
We moved to California in 1986, and I got a day job as a computer science professor. By 1990, I’d switched to keeping my journals in electronic form. It took me awhile to fully commit to this process, so the 1990–1992 entries are drawn not only from journal entries, but also from letters, emails, and writing notes. But soon things settled down.
Journals 1990-2014 contains a variety of elements:
- • Introspection. I turn to my journals when I’m undergoing a personal crisis. As a novelist, it often amuses me to dramatize and exaggerate, as if I’m in a state of hopeless despair. Once I’ve said the worst possible things, my real life seems bearable.
- • Philosophizing. I’m forever seeking a path to enlightenment. And a deep understanding of how the world works. I feel like it’s ultimately a matter of paying close attention to things that most people overlook.
- • Journalism. I like to describe what I see going on around me, that is, I follow Jack Kerouac’s practice of sketching daily scenes in real time. I’m particularly likely to work on my journals when I’m on the road or on a day trip.
- • Writing notes. I like thinking about words themselves, and about the craft of writing. I’m always looking for ideas, and I like to transmute my life into SF scenarios. By necessity, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how to get published, and how to stay in print.
I’ve written many more writing notes than those included here. I create a book-length sets of writing notes for each my novels and nonfiction books. You can find free electronic versions of these volumes on my Notes on Writing page. And ever since 2004, I’ve also been posting text and images on Rudy’s Blog.
So we have the old paper scrapbooks, the journals, the writing notes, and the blog. The scrapbooks are in my basement, the journals are in Journals 1990-2014, and the writing notes and the blog are online.
§
In 2012 I started my own publishing enterprise, Transreal Books. I’ve produced collections of my work, reprints of my novels, two new novels, and as a change of pace, a reprint of Be Not Content, an underground 60s novel by William J. Craddock.
And now I decided it would be interesting to publish Journals 1990-2014. The editing required four passes, done off and on during the last three years. On the final pass, Roger House and Michael Troutman provided invaluable help with proofreading. And thanks to my daughter, Georgia Rucker, for guidance with the cover design.
This book’s website is www.rudyrucker.com/journals. I’ll be posting some photos to go with the Journals. And if you find typos, you can report them on the book’s website as well.
Rudy Rucker
www.rudyrucker.com
Los Gatos, California
April 14, 2015
Here’s a look at the causes and treatment of clang association, as well as examples of this speech pattern.
Clang association isn’t a speech disorder like stuttering. According to psychiatrists at Johns Hopkins Medical Center, clanging is a sign of a thought disorder — an inability to organize, process, or communicate thoughts.
Thought disorders are associated with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, although at least one dementia may also demonstrate this speech pattern.
A clanging sentence may begin with coherent thought and then get derailed by sound associations.
For instance:
I'm never get you want) I wanna be big rockstars And live in It's like the mile high club at thirtyseven thousand feet Been there, we all just wanna be great like Elvis without the Playboy mansion Gonna join the VIP with standing in It's like Elvis without the latest dictionary and well Hey hey I don't get you gonna win This life for me So how you anything with a rockstar Hey hey I wanna be big enough For ten plus me So how you anything with a centerfold that loves to be big enough For ten plus me what you gonna trade this life hasn't turned out Quite the Playboy Bunny with that loves to the coolest bars In the latest dictionary and James Dean is fine for fortune and well Hey hey I can play baseball in the coolest bars In the tassels Hire eight body guards that evil smile Everybody's got a bedroom in the private rooms With the way I wanna be a rockstar Hey hey I wanna be big rockstars And a brand new house On an episode of Cribs And a couple autographs so I wanna be a new house On an episode of the VIP with a pez dispenser I'll get 'em every night so I wanna be a brand new house On an episode of Cribs And live in the latest dictionary and fame I'd even cut my money for me (So what you gonna sing those songs Lip sync 'em wrong Well, well Hey hey I wanna be (Tell me (So how you anything with the mile high club at thirtyseven thousand feet (Been there Every Playboy Bunny with the censors Gonna pop my ass with the movie stars Every good gold digger's gonna win This life hasn't turned out Quite the drugs come easy and change my money for fortune and change my name 'Cause we just wanna be a king size tub big rockstars And a bathroom I wanna be a drug dealer on Hollywood Boulevard Somewhere between Cher and change my name 'Cause we just won't eat And we'll hide out Quite the private rooms With the drugs come easy and
James Dean is fine for me what you need?
“I was on my way to the store the chore the bore some more”
If you notice clanging in someone’s speech, especially if it becomes impossible to understand what the person is trying to say, it’s important to get medical help.
Clanging may be an indication that the individual is either having or about to have an episode of psychosis. During these episodes, people may hurt themselves or others, so getting help quickly is important.
In a clang association, a word group has similar sounds but doesn’t create a logical idea or thought. Poets often use rhymes and words with double meanings, so clanging sometimes sounds like poetry or song lyrics — except these word combinations don’t convey any rational meaning.
Here are a couple of examples of clang association sentences:
Searches
“Here comes cat punning sound words word mental disorganized neologisms psych loose vs flight examples never It at feet there, all just great mansion Gonna standing."
It anything rockstar anything centerfold loves trade has loves coolest bars fortune coolest bars Hire eight body guards evil smile got way rockstar pez em fame 'd even cut my money Lip sync em wrong , Tell anything at feet there Gonna pop my gold has my money fortune.
King bathroom drug on Hollywood Boulevard between Cher, related to “Here she comes with a cat catch a rat match.”
schizophrenia language examples
I wanna be big rockstars And live in It's like the mile high club at thirtyseven thousand feet (Been there, we all just wanna be great like Elvis without the Playboy mansion Gonna join the VIP with standing in It's like Elvis without the latest dictionary and well Hey hey I don't get you gonna win This life for me So how you anything with a rockstar Hey hey I wanna be big enough For ten plus me (So how you anything with a centerfold that loves to be big enough For ten plus me what you gonna trade this life hasn't turned out Quite the Playboy Bunny with that loves to the coolest bars In the latest dictionary and James Dean is fine for fortune and well Hey hey I can play baseball in the coolest bars In the tassels Hire eight body guards that evil smile Everybody's got a bedroom in the private rooms With the way I wanna be a rockstar Hey hey I wanna be big rockstars And a brand new house On an episode of Cribs And a couple autographs so I wanna be a new house On an episode of the VIP with a pez dispenser I'll get 'em every night so I wanna be a brand new house On an episode of Cribs And live in the latest dictionary and fame I'd even cut my money for me So what you gonna sing those songs Lip sync 'em wrong Well, well Hey hey I wanna be Tell me So how you anything with the mile high club at thirtyseven thousand feet Been there Every Playboy Bunny with the censors Gonna pop my ass with the movie stars Every good gold digger's gonna win This life hasn't turned out Quite the drugs come easy and change my money for fortune and change my name 'Cause we just wanna be a king size tub big rockstars And a bathroom I wanna be a drug dealer on Hollywood Boulevard Somewhere between Cher and change my name
Cause we just won't eat
And we'll hide out
Quite the private rooms
With the drugs come easy
and
James Dean is fine for me what you need?
“Here she comes with a cat catch a rat match.”
“There’s a mile-long dial trial a while, child.”
Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder that causes people to experience distortions of reality. They may have hallucinations or delusions. It can also affect speech.
Researchers noted a connection between clanging and schizophrenia as far back as 1899. More recent research has confirmed this connection.
People who are experiencing an acute episode of schizophrenic psychosis may also show other speech disruptions like:
Poverty of speech: one- or two-word responses to questions
Pressure of speech: speech that is loud, fast, and hard to follow
Schizophasia: “word salad,” jumbled, random words
Loose associations: speech that suddenly shifts to an unrelated subject
Neologisms: speech that includes made-up words
Echolalia: speech that repeats whatever someone else is saying
Silicon Valley / 1990-1992
The Professor and the Ants
March 22, 1990. I’m 44. Proctoring Tests.
God what a futuristic date! And it’s my forty-fourth birthday!
I’m proctoring an exam in my C Programming class. Proctor. At Swarthmore there were boys called proctors and it was their job to turn you in to student court if they saw you drinking. Proctology. Proctoscopic, dude.
Four years ago I was an unemployed writer turning forty in Lynchburg, Virginia. That was the day they offered me this job at San Jose State. I’m enjoying teaching this semester. I guess I like teaching after all. Swarthmore is raising their costs to $21K a year for daughter Georgia, which is about the same that San Jose State gives me for teaching halftime. I teach halftime this year because I’m also working as a software designer for Autodesk of Sausalito, California.
It’s almost suppertime, and I’ve already driven to Sausalito and back, seventy miles each way. James Gleick is here for two days to talk about the interface for this commercial program we’re developing at Autodesk, James Gleick’s Chaos: The Software.
Writing Chaos and teaching computer science is all I’ve done since last June when I finished my novel, The Hollow Earth. The Chaos work has been quite a job, but incredibly rewarding. We’ve had many amazing discoveries. Latest is a 3D perspective rendering of the Lorenz attractor, looking like an alien squid. It’s based on three differential equations. I really like wallowing in math, to tell the truth. Happy as a pig in math. This glittering manic nerd joy at using the logical tools to their ultimate abilities. Yes, the work is rewarding—but I want it to be over.So, yeah, it’s my birthday and, unlike most birthdays, I’m not drunk. Today’s a work day. Yesterday I smoked pot all day, mowed the lawn with our reel mower, went to the dentist, and drank a bottle of wine and eight beers.
I’ve been going to a periodontist recently. I’m going to lose many teeth. I have one which flared up and is killing me, I’d let ’em pull it right now. That happens as you get truly middle-aged, your teeth want to fall out. Nature’s way is to put a huge suppurating abscess under the tooth to eat away the bone so the tooth can fall out on its own. Who mumble needs damn teef anyway.Our son Rudy got into Berkeley, and wants to go. All right! We’ll miss him, but there is this feeling towards the end of their senior year that they’re outgrowing the family nest. Yesterday I was hassling him about a car key he’d lost, being an overbearing father. But in a way, I’m filled with grief at the prospect of him leaving home.
Forty-four, as forty as you can be. I think Jack Kerouac only made it to forty-seven. And Eddie Poe forty. My father and grandfather had heart problems starting in their fifties. I’m not looking forward to heart problems—that’s even worse than teeth. I should lose lots of weight. I weigh two hundred pounds all of a sudden. Maybe once I finish Chaos I can lose weight. And write science fiction or something.My students are still working. I told them they could have the whole hour and fifteen minutes of class time—I wish I’d said just an hour, and then I could go get a beer and have supper.
Funniest question on my C Programming test: I defined an array of numbers called what, and showed them the code for a function called huh( ), and I asked them the value of huh(what). Huh? What?
It’s hard to eat with this bad tooth. I was clean and sober for three days and yesterday I was loaded. These days, a three-day clean and sober spell feels quite ample.
Sylvia is making Wiener schnitzel for supper tonight, a big family favorite. Her family won me with schnitzel, back in the mid-1960s, when I went to visit them in Geneva. Sylvia and I were courting, and I was a college sophomore, and my future mother-in-law made schnitzel several times. It was the best food I’d ever tasted. They gave me the best wine I’d ever had, they were witty and international, they had a great apartment with a view of the lake and a swimming pool on the roof—it was wonderful.Still in reminiscence mode, the other day I was thinking about my last spring at dear Swarthmore College, and I could summon up that same ungovernable and inconsolable sorrow I felt about having my college years end, sorrow at having that last dance of youth end, with all my friends to be scattered across the planet. I loved how the breeze would waft blossom petals off the fruit trees on the president’s long rolling lawn. I’d stand under those trees with my future wife, shaking the branches to make the petals drift down on us, and then we’d kiss. Like that old-time student song, Sic Semper In Flore, meaning something like, “We’ll always be in bloom like this.”
Each new section of the Chaos program gets deep into my head and I see the shit everywhere. Latest are Yorke’s quasiperiodic maps which consist of sine functions jamming off each other. Yorke published the parameters that he used, eighteen sets of twelve-place decimal numbers, and I typed them all into our Chaos source code, and zowie, there are the same gnarly pictures that Yorke had in his article!It reminded me of a scene in Heinlein’s Starman Jones—they’ve lost their star atlas, the boy hero remembers the numbers they need to hyperjump back to Terra, and he types in these hundreds of digits.
Yesterday I saw a goose in one of the Yorke patterns, a long neck goose, and yesterday evening I could hear the goose in my music too. Chaos is where it’s at.
Turns out there’s a four-dimensional Mandelbrot set and I found it with our Chaos program. That was such a strange thing to actually find it—I already knew from my science-fiction what it would look like. I like it better than the three-dimensional Mandelbrot set I found with Mathematica a couple of years ago—that one is very hard to compute.Last night someone was asking me why I’m so driven, like why I work so hard. I think it’s because of the idiosyncrasy credit. I found out about that growing up in the Fifties when the only oddball publically tolerated—at least in hideous smug Louisville—was the holy Einstein. He had long hair and wore a sweatshirt and no socks and everyone thought it was okay because he was a genius.
So maybe I do all this work so I have enough idiosyncrasy credit to get drunk and stoned the rest of the time and to not give a shit about politics. Lately I’ve been reading the paper too much though, we get it delivered, and every morning my mind’s invaded by all these bad trips—ozone, Middle East, homelessness, Republicans, etc.We were at a big St. Patrick’s day bash last week. There’s a local bar, Hannegan’s, where if you give them twenty-five dollars you can come and eat all you want all day, although you have to buy your own beer and shots—there’s bottles of whiskey on the counters everywhere. Irish bands, scads of people, everyone getting really tanked, it was great, man, I had such a good time, I danced so much that my shoulders were all sore. One guy tried to start a fistfight with me, but I stayed out of the fight. I walked home without drunk driving—Hannegan’s is that close to where we live.
The students still laboring on huh(what). I don’t like the way Mustafa A. is leaning over Tom S. in the billed cap there.I had this class work on an ants program here last week, that’s the next thing I’ll work on at Autodesk after the Chaos program finally ships, Autodesk Ants, it’s an artificial life idea we think could be cool. You can program your ants, and put them on a disk and go over to your friend’s house and he’s got Autodesk Ants too, so you put your ants in his system and they fight it out with his ants. May the best ant win! What do they eat? Computation cycles and memory. I already have some ants that grow lace.
A kind of humorous and common problem with ants programs is sometimes the ants get loose and crawl out of the memory area where you are growing them, and they get into your operating system and crash your machine. Like viruses, really. The whole artificial life field is deliciously louche. There’s nothing that the media fears more than computer viruses, and we a-life types are working to make self-reproducing bits of computer code that can evolve to become more and more autonomous. A little like what I wrote about with the evolving bopper robots in Software. I’d like to write a novel about these kinds of ants.Okay, almost time to collect the papers. huh(what)? The answer is 2.5.
And then I’ll get a tallboy can of beer at the 7-11 by the San Jose State parking lot, and drive home and have yaaay Wiener schnitzel and asparagus with Sylvia and kids. What a great life!April 27, 1990. Losing My Teeth.
Today I went to the oral surgeon and had seven teeth pulled out. Both back teeth on either side on the top, and one of the back molars on the bottom, and two wisdom teeth on the bottom. The periodontist wanted me to get the two second to last molars on the bottom pulled, too, but I managed to stave him off by the simple expedient of telling him in truthful Californese that I couldn’t handle the stress. They gave me nitrous oxide and some intravenous Demerol, so I was figuring at least I’ll get high, but it was just a hangoverless blackout.My mouth feels odd, the tongue-familiar row of teeth so abbreviated on top. Yet those ousted teeth were constantly irritating the gums, heating them and wrinkling them. I asked them to give me the teeth to take home, but they only handed over three of them, the unborn wisdoms too gross I guess, and two of the regular ones broke off at the roots and they had to pull the roots out separately with special pinchers—I planed up into wakefulness as they were doing that, the remarkable thing being the complete lack of affect I felt knowing he was pulling three broken roots out of my jaw, hail the poppy.
This afternoon I got out a pocketknife and scraped off all the lowdown big black deposits on those brought-home teeth, the deposits having formed because of deep gum pockets and being the source of endless incurable irritation and further gum loss, leading to bone loss, leading to extraction.
In William Golding’s Pincher Martin
Last week I realized I needed a break from pot and I flushed the remainder of my stash, and since then I’ve been having a much richer dream life. Here’s one I had the other day:
I’m at a zoo and there are two pens, one with aardvarks and one with armadillos. I think the cute ’dillos would like to change pens, so I swap the animals, it takes only a simple act of volition. But then the armadillos don’t like the new pen after all, and they root and scoot under their fence back to the old cage.
But the aardvarks are really aggressive, trying to fend them off, looking exactly like Gilbert Shelton cartoons of snarling dogs, with big C-shaped open mouths and back-slanted funny fangs, I was laughing so hard in my dream.
And then, still dreaming, I went downstairs and there were some Haight-Ashbury-type bad girls, and I went to their apartment and we got high and things sped up more and more. The girls got out a big ball of shit—I’m talking about excrement—and they’re building shapes out of the shit, it’s like claymation, the changes are going by so fast that I can’t believe it. I lean over the floor and shit pops out of my own mouth, bap bap bap, and it brown-crawls around a bit and spells out ART!
§
I reread Heinlein’s Door Into Summer this week, too. I’ve always liked that book, its intricate sliding puzzle of time-travel moves. The main guy is an engineer, what Heinlein liked to call a “competent man.” He’s not a drugged-out, cringing, perverted, psychopathic cyberpunk. Not that I don’t like those kinds of characters.
But I’m thinking that in the real world, professional programmers, although somewhat quirky, are more like engineers than like stereotyped cyberpunks. My Autodesk friend and superhacker John Walker is in no way like Johnny Rotten! Pitching for the punk thing may limit the possible audience. I’m a middle-aged yuppie family-man—why should I try to write as if I were a bitter working-class junkie.
I do have those punk feelings because of being the youngest child in my family, Vietnam-war alienation, and having bad experiences in academia—San Jose State turned me down for early tenure this week, I’m forty-four and I still can’t get tenure!
But it would be refreshing to write about a competent engineer type guy, although not an actual Heinlein character with the sexism and militarism and the corny jokes.
Like, why weren’t the astronauts artists?
Bipolar disorder is a condition that causes people to experience extreme mood changes.
People with this disorder usually have prolonged periods of depression as well as manic periods characterized by extreme happiness, sleeplessness, and risky behavior.Studiousness Source have found that clang association is particularly common among people in the manic phase of bipolar disorder.
People experiencing mania often speak in a rushed way, where the speed of their speech matches the rapid thoughts surging through their mind. It’s important to know that clanging is not unheard of during depressive episodes, too.
Studiousness Source have found that thought disorders generally disrupt the ability to communicate, which can include both written and spoken communication.
Researchers think that the problems are connected to disturbances in working memory and semantic memory, or the ability to remember words and their meanings.
A study-trusted Source in 2000 showed that when some people with schizophrenia write down words that are read aloud to them, they swap phonemes. This means, for example, that they’ll write down the letter “v”, when the letter “f” was the correct spelling.
In these cases, the sounds produced by “v” and “f” are similar but not exactly the same, suggesting that the individual didn’t recall the right letter for the sound.
Because this thought disorder is associated with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, treating it requires treating the underlying mental health condition.
A doctor may prescribe antipsychotic medications. Cognitive behavioral therapy, group therapy, or family therapy may also help manage symptoms and behaviors.
Clang associations are groups of words chosen because of the catchy way they sound, not because of what they mean. Clanging word groups don’t make sense together.
People who speak using repetitive clang associations may have a mental health condition such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Both of these conditions are considered thought disorders because the condition disrupts the way the brain processes and communicates information.
Speaking in clang associations may precede an episode of psychosis, so it’s important to get help for someone whose speech is unintelligible. Antipsychotic medications and various forms of therapy may be part of a treatment approach.
Editing my Journals has been a pleasant, nostalgic exercise—and it’s given me a clearer idea about what kind of person I am. And now maybe I’m done. That is, I’m still making notes for my writing projects, but I’m not keeping personal journals like I used to. Not looking over my own shoulder. Letting go.
§
Journals 1990-2014 runs to over four hundred thousand words—the length of three or four novels. I remember reading the mammoth Andy Warhol Diaries from beginning to end in 1992. It was hypnotic, and in some ways it was a model for my own Journals.
But there’s no need to read my Journals all at once. Dipping in is fine.
If there’s something specific that you’re looking for, consult the table of contents. Or open an electronic version of the book, and do a search. Or simply root around, subliminally guided by the Muse.
You’ll find what you need.
§
One last thing. I wouldn’t have been able to publish this book without the generous financial support of my wonderful backers:
Heartfelt thanks to each of them!I m never get you want.
I wanna be big rockstars And live in It's like the mile high club at thirtyseven thousand feet (Been there, we all just wanna be great like Elvis without the Playboy mansion Gonna join the VIP with standing in It's like Elvis without the latest dictionary and well Hey hey.
I don't get you gonna win This life for me (So how you anything with a rockstar Hey hey
I wanna be big enough For ten plus me (So how you anything with a centerfold that loves to be big enough For ten plus me what you gonna trade this life hasn't turned out Quite the Playboy Bunny with that loves to the coolest bars In the latest dictionary and James Dean is fine for fortune and well Hey hey
I can play baseball in the coolest bars In the tassels Hire eight body guards that evil smile Everybody's got a bedroom in the private rooms With the way
I wanna be a rockstar Hey hey
I wanna be big rockstars And a brand new house On an episode of Cribs And a couple autographs so
I wanna be a new house On an episode of the VIP with a pez dispenser I ll get 'em every night so.
I wanna be a brand new house On an episode of Cribs And live in the latest dictionary and fame I d even cut my money for me (So what you gonna sing those songs Lip sync 'em wrong Well, well Hey hey.
I wanna be (Tell me (So how you anything with the mile high club at thirtyseven thousand feet (Been there Every Playboy Bunny with the censors Gonna pop my ass with the movie stars Every good gold digger's gonna win This life hasn't turned out Quite the drugs come easy and change my money for fortune and change my name 'Cause we just wanna be a king size tub big rockstars And a bathroom.
I wanna be a drug dealer on Hollywood Boulevard Somewhere between Cher and change my name 'Cause we just won't eat And we'll hide out Quite the private rooms With the drugs come easy and
James Dean is fine for me what you need