Since Coy developed LBD his speech patterns have changed. He very seldom has trouble coming up with the word he wants to use, but what is sometimes surprising is his choice of words. Yesterday when he came home I greeted him, "Ah, the bowler has returned!" and he scowled and said "The ersatz bowler has returned." I laughed and laughed. "I take it I shouldn't ask your scores today?" He agreed that that would be a bad idea.

I think most of us have a huge store of words we understand or at least would understand in context, a smaller (but still very large) store of words we might use in formal writing, and a smaller subset that we use in casual conversation. For Coy, these boundaries no longer seem to exist. When he was paranoid and angry he used swear words. Obviously they were in the store of words he understood but I had never heard him use one in all the years I've known him. Now that he is calm and lucid most of the time he frequently comes up with other words I've never heard him use, like ersatz. It is in both of our full vocabulary stores, but I don't think I've ever said it out loud or even written it. But I immediately knew what he meant.

This has happened repeatedly from the beginning. It has been hard sometimes to keep a straight face when he comes out with a ten-dollar word where the two-bit equivalent would be expected. But he uses them correctly and communicates well. Even when he used swear words, it was appropriate in context (for someone who swears). Only when he is very tired or sick does he have trouble finding any word with the meaning he wants.

This is not an "issue" or a problem. I'm just curious. Have any of you had similar experiences with your loved ones?

Yes, my mother struggles a lot for words, and some of the substitutes she comes up with are familiar but, as you said, not commonly used in conversation. The big change is that she used to stop and ask me if I knew what she meant when she couldn't think of a word. Now she just throws in a substitute and keeps going, as if she isn't even aware of the error.

One big shock was when she was in the hospital and took a dislike to one of the doctors and one of the therapists. She started calling them both by the same derogatory and very crude term for men. I never heard her say anything like that before. In any case, I just keep a straight face and move on as though she hasn't said anything unusual.

Julianne

When my dad couldn't come up with a word, he'd sometimes fill in any random word that came to his mind, and later as his communications deteriorated, he'd fill in random syllables and then get very angry if we couldn't figure out what he was saying. It was awful. I do remember things like 6 to 8 inches of snow being "6 to 8 feet of people", and that's why he couldn't get to dinner, because they couldn't push him through so many feet of people to get to the dining room (the same dining room that was around 50 feet down the hall from his room and NOT outside).
And, he didn't mind calling one of his CGs (to his or her face) some awful, derogatory name, when he didn't like the person. He would not have done that before.
I don't remember any $10 vocabulary words being spoken like you've experienced, Jeanne. Lynn

Oh, Lynn! That sounds SO familiar!

I too have noticed the speech/language alterations. I've made a conscientious effort to hide my laughter becasue mom is still in denial mode. Earlier she said "When the comforter was in the cooker." Made sense- dryer=heat and so does a cooker. She also substitutes words and keeps on trucking. We know each other so well, I used to finish sentences for her. Now I know the stopping mid sentence was a sign.

It isn't exactly that Coy substitutes words, and certainly not nonsense words or random words when he is alert. It is just that sometimes the words he uses, without hesitation or apparent conscious thought, are not the same words he would have used before. They are correct, though. Before he met Lewy he might ask if his pants are out of the drier. Now he might ask about his trousers. He is always looking for his favorite reading glasses, but some days now they are his spectacles or even his corrective lenses. Not wrong, just different.

Pre-LBD Coy might have answered my gretting by saying, "Huh. You mean the fake bowler is home." Or "The bowling imposter is home." Referring to himself (after a bad session at the alley) as an "ersatz bowler" was funny and impressive and conveyed exactly the thought he wanted to express. It was just a word I'd never hear him say before.

When he is extremely confused he also does the wrong-word substitution thing. (Saying "The carrots fell" meaning he dropped the book with the orange cover, etc.) It is when he is very lucid and alert that he uses correct but unusual words or sentences.

Jeannie,
I am wondering if this is the way things were described in his youth and he relaxed or moved with the times in his expression of things over the years and now is back to that area of life.

We had a stnage thing happen that made me thing of this, one time my husband asked me if I knew Mrs. Barton's first name, (they were neighbors from many yrs ago) I told him I didn't and I mentioned this to Jim's older stater and she told me they had a neighbor when they were kids with the same name, I asked how I could tell the difference and she told me they were a family of a different race so I brought this up in conversation with Jim and he told me as if I was supposed to know it was the family from where he was young he was about 9 yrs old, I wasn't even born when he was 9 but acted like I should know about them, he just couldn't grasp the concept that I wasn't around then.

Interesting suggestion, Irene. That could certainly account for the pants/trousers type of switch. But many of his "ten dollar" words don't seem to me to be commonly used in casual conversation in the midwest, then or now. They would more apt to be picked up in his reading. And when he uses them he is not typically confused or having a bad day. (Bad bowling day, yes. Bad Lewy day, no.) It's a good theory, though. I wish I'd written down some of his surprising word uses. I'll try to make a point of noticing them more.

My mum often uses strange words as well.

Finding the correct word is difficult so she uses something associative that comes to mind. I myself am bilingual and sometimes have trouble finding the right word in right language so I can understand where she's coming from. I nearly always manage to substitute the right word but my wife who is not a native English speaker sometimes has no idea what she means.

Leone, when Dale says upstairs and downstairs maybe he thinks there is an upstairs and downstairs. My mum has this thing (on her off-days) where she thinks she live simultaneously in two apartments ("reduplicative paramnesia") so she will sometimes talk about her bedroom "upstairs" or "down the corridor".

Starman, when Coy wanted to go upstairs, he really seemed to think there was another story to our house. He went looking for the stairway often. In his case I don't think it was a matter of using the wrong words -- it was a confusion about place. So I think our experience with that is like yours with your mum. They both have trouble finding the right words sometimes, but "upstairs" is what they really meant.

I hadn't heard that term before but it must be similar to Capgras syndrome. There have been [at least] two of me and two identical houses, too, with my husband's LBD.

I saw the term "reduplicative paramnesia" in the Wikipedia article on LBD. It was kind of a Eureka moment when I was reading article so the name stuck in my mind. I had always thought that her duplication of place was weird and then when I saw it written down that other people also had this and it had a name that matched the symptoms of her diagnosis, I just thought "wow, so that's what she had all along".

Yes, reduplicative paramnesia and Capgras are the same.