Mr. Atom's speech patterns are quite unusual, and many believe that his strange way of speaking is the result of a mental disorder such as word salad, a condition in which sentence structure and grammar are intact, but individual words are picked at random and have no particular meaning. This article pulls together all of the things Mr. Atom has said since his first appearance, identifies the context of each line, and determines whether or not the line qualifies as a word salad.
Mr. Atom's speech in chronological order[]
| Quote | Episode | Context | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Uhdyeah, what ees it, Miss Tiny?" | Sports | Responding to Little Miss Tiny, who had just gotten his attention. | This is just a friendly greeting. |
| "Oh no!" | Sports | He said this just before Mr. Heavy fell on him. | This makes sense, as Mr. Heavy is too heavy for Mr. Atom to lift. |
| "DAAaaAA, hello, Marzi-pa-yun. It's Homsar! DAAaaAA, I was just calling to thank you for the flowers you sent me while I was in the hospital. Daahh, I'm feeling much better now, but I still can't feel my leeegs. Okay, bye-dee-bye!" | Hospital (A Message) | Mr. Atom has presumably recovered from having Mr. Heavy fallen on him. | Mr. Atom speaks in perfect (if exaggerated) English in this message, calling Miss Solo by her first name (as well as referring to himself as Homsar). |
Analysis and Summary[]
As shown here, there are logical arguments for almost all of Mr. Atom's phrases. It seems that he simply has an odd and somewhat indirect way of communicating with others.
There is a pattern that appears during this analysis, however: In almost every case, if there's a strong reason for Mr. Atom to communicate a particular concept, he'll do it unerringly — one can always tell what he means. It is when he doesn't have a particularly strong reason to communicate that his speech becomes more random. For example, if he has a request ("That's a real popular song! Who wants to hear of it fifty times more?"), his sentence relates quite clearly to the scene, and is itself perfectly valid, even if there was a much more direct way of saying it. But in his character video, his sentences are almost completely disconnected from one another, and sometimes, he had no particular reason to send a message, so he seemed to just pull a random sentence out of thin air, perhaps just so he could say something.
It seems clear that while Mr. Atom doesn't have a strong grasp on reality, he is pretty coherent most of the time, and he can relate to other characters and his surroundings when he needs to. Looking at the definition of "word salad" as given by Wikipedia, it does not appear that Mr. Atom suffers from this disorder — at least, not much.
However, Mr. Microscopic is able to understand what Mr. Atom says. Sometimes, what Mr. Microscopic hears is heard as well. What he hears is in Mr. Atom's original voice.