Sprinkles or Jimmys?

"And I sprinkled some white chocolate jimmys on top.  It's wicked awesome." 

I heard this phrase while I was on vacation in New England with my family.  Now I'm guessing that most of your reading this are completely confused what the heck a Jimmy might be.  However, my sister in law in is from Pennsylvania, so I've heard this phrase before and new it meant sprinkles.  I was kind of amused to hear it was an expression in this area too.  I texted "Auntie Fry" and she was happy to see those folks knew that it's jimmys and not sprinkles that go on top of ice cream.  

So since I was feeling punchy and I had all of your Facebook followers in front of me I threw the question out to you all.  What do you call it?  Now overwhelmingly  most said sprinkles but there were a lot of folks who knew what I meant by calling them Jimmys.  Then my fries from Down Under were quick to tell me "Oh no.  Those are called hundreds and thousands." and another phrase was added to the mix.  Auntie Fry and I texted back and forth in awe at the regional differences.  It really got me thinking how confusing that all was for one silly dessert topping.  This isn't the only word in the English language like this one.  It once again reminded me just how complicated it can be for someone with autism.  

My kiddo has been in speech therapy since he was roughly two years old.  I'm pretty sure we always will be.  There's just so much more he has to work on plus now that he is so open to trying new foods with said magic speech therapist, we'll be going till they kick us out.  I suspect by the time he's done there, we'll have a room named after us at least.  Or so I would like to think.  Everybody loves him there! My point is, it's not just getting him to be able to say these words clearly but he's still learning what they all mean.  Think of how confusing it is for you to hear "Put some jimmys on that ice cream cone."  Now you might not be familiar with the slang of a dessert topping but based on the rest of the sentence you could probably figure it out.  Or at least question what that means.  I think a lot of sentences to the Kiddo are like that.  So many words have more than one meaning and he's constantly trying to figure them all out.  Plus add tone of voice, well now it's getting really complicated.   He's also trying to figure out social cues and facial expressions to boot.  He's got a set of parents who communicate pretty exclusively in sarcasm to each other.  It's no wonder why some days he just sticks to his verbal scripts from various Pixar movies.  Those lines, those words never change.

Just another reminder of how many little stressors there are in a day for him and for us.  Now I'm off to write a social story for him about how some folks call fries "chips" before there is an international incident.