author
Howard L. Chace
1897–1982
Best known for the delightfully strange wordplay of Anguish Languish, this American linguist turned sound, rhythm, and misheard phrases into literary comedy. His most famous piece, “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut,” still surprises readers with how much meaning can hide inside nonsense.
1 Audiobook
Anguish Languish
by Howard L. Chace
About the author
Howard L. Chace was an American linguist and a professor of Romance languages at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Born in 1897 and dying in 1982, he built a reputation not just as a teacher but as a writer with a wonderfully playful ear for language.
He is remembered above all for his experiments in homophonic transformation: writing English passages out of similar-sounding but wrong words so that they seem absurd on the page and suddenly make sense when read aloud. His best-known piece, Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, began in 1940 as a demonstration of how important intonation is to meaning.
Chace later gathered this style of comic linguistic invention in Anguish Languish, published in 1956. The book remains a small classic of language humor, enjoyed by readers who love puns, sound play, and the odd joy of realizing that gibberish is secretly telling a familiar story.