Howard L. Chace

Born in 1897, Howard L. Chace was an American linguist and a professor of Romance languages at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is remembered less for conventional scholarship than for the playful way he explored language and listening.

His signature specialty was homophonic transformation: writing pieces made of ordinary English words that sound like something else when spoken aloud. That approach reached its best-known form in Anguish Languish (1956), the collection that includes the much-loved "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut," a comic retelling of "Little Red Riding Hood."

What makes Chace memorable is that the joke is also the point. His work shows, in a fun and surprisingly sharp way, how intonation, context, and the ear itself shape meaning.