When you say ‘nonsense,’ do you mean vocalizations that are never formed into words, like when we moan or cry out, sigh or smack our lips? Or the fish mouth, cooing and gitchey-gitchey-goo sounds we use with infants and intimate partners? Could he be making word-like sounds in a cadence you both recognize as a sentence in hopes you’ll be playful enough to sentence him back?
By ‘nonsense,’ do you mean making sounds that aren’t words, like when we moan or cry out, sigh or smack our lips? Or the fish mouth, cooing and gitchey-gitchey-goo sounds we make for infants and intimate partners? If so, is he making those sounds in sentence-like cadences in hopes you’ll be playful enough to sentence him back? Is the rhythm like singing and chanting, or more like how we woof, woof, woof the dog? If it’s like singing, how about singing along with him? If it’s not, and he’s using words, are they spoken out of order and used in strange ways, with bad grammar—with pauses in the wrong places, or no pauses at all? Is it like poetry in changing familiar, taken-for-granted rhythms and refreshing the language? Does he also use metaphors or invent phrases that sound like what they mean—“smack frittering an egg” instead of scrambling one, or saying “hold you me” instead of “hold me.” If so, maybe he’s becoming a more poetic soul, and how wonderful that could be for him—and for you!
Maybe he’s riffing off nursery rhymes or folktales or trying to mimic advertisers or politicians. Could he be mouthing phrases that he knows don’t make sense, just to try them out—things he’s heard from someone else that puzzle him? Is what he’s doing at all like when we repeat memorable lines from movies, plays, or songs that someone wrote just to entertain us? Or like when we make fun of how someone else says something. Could he be doing that with what he’s heard from you?
Or does what you’re calling nonsense come out as intelligible words in well-formed sentences that are simply not true. Does he say he’s Andrew Jackson’s brother or the first person to cross the Atlantic in a bath tub, or that gravity bends time and space? If so, do you think he might be lying or teasing you? I’m not saying he is, but would his talk still be nonsense if he were? And how does his kind of nonsense compare with saying we feel fine when we don’t—or vice versa? Could he be doing something like that, just to make small talk and stay connected? Or, is he more ambitious than that? When you ask a direct question, does he respond with a story or enigmatic phrase, like Hamlet did, or Jesus or the Buddha? Does he tell you stories that ask too much of you? Are his stories based on what he watched on television the night before? When he talks nonsense, does he assume you remember everything you’ve ever said to him, even little things from several months ago?
Maybe the best response to any of this are all the little things we do when we can’t understand what someone else is saying: Listen closely. Invite them to say more. Use non-verbal and contextual clues to identify what the person might be responding to. Pay attention to feelings as well as words. You’ve probably done things like that with young children, people who are hard of hearing, or even pets, right? If so, the same skills can help you out here, though they do require patience. Is that an issue as well? Does his talking nonsense make it more difficult for you to be patient with him? Would it be easier for you to visit if he were quiet, or even asleep, than when he tries to express things in ways you cannot yet understand?