A 41-year-old man in a hypomanic episode wanders through several unrelated topics when asked a simple question, but each time, after a minute or two of tangents, he laughingly says "anyway, back to your question" and gives a reasonably direct answer. Before revealing the answer: is this flight of ideas, and what specific feature of his speech tells you which variant this is?
This is flight of ideas, but specifically the milder, ordered variant sometimes called prolixity — typical of hypomania rather than full mania. The feature that identifies it as this variant, rather than the more severe form, is that he can still find his way back to the original topic despite the frequent detours, unlike the more severe form where the thread is lost entirely and never recovered.
References
- Casey, P. & Kelly, B. (2019). Fish's Clinical Psychopathology, 4th ed. Ch. 4, 'Disorders of Thought and Speech'.