Anguish Languish
The Anguish Languish is an ersatz
Chace offered this description: "The Anguish Languish consists only of the purest of English words, and its chief raison d'être is to demonstrate the marvelous versatility of a language in which almost anything can, if necessary, be made to mean something else." His story "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut" is "Little Red Riding Hood" re-written with similar-sounding words (all of them legitimate words in themselves, but with unrelated meanings) substituting for the original folk tale. A professor of French, Chace wrote "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut" in 1940 to demonstrate that the intonation of spoken English is almost as important to the meaning as the words themselves. It was first published in Gene Sherman's "Cityside" column in the Los Angeles Times in 1953, reprinted in the San Francisco Chronicle and in the first issue of Sports Illustrated in 1954.[3][4]
Book
After Arthur Godfrey read "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut" on one of his programs, thousands of requests for copies of the story prompted the publication of Chace's stories and nursery rhymes in Anguish Languish, illustrated with cartoons by Hal Doremus.[1]
In the Anguish Languish, a single word replaces several in the correct version (e.g., "evanescent" from "if it isn't"), and sometimes several words replace one longer word ("on forger nut" for "unfortunate"). Every word can be found in most collegiate dictionaries.
Although written with a serious purpose in mind, the humorous aspects cannot be ignored, especially with Chace's additions of phrases not in the traditional stories ("A nervous sausage bag ice!" for "I never saw such big eyes!") and added plot twists.
Bibliography
See also
- Afferbeck Lauder
- Homophonic translation
- Mondegreen
- Mots d'Heures
- N'Heures Souris Rames
- Phono-semantic matching
References
- ^ a b Chace, Howard L. Anguish Languish, Prentice-Hall, 1967.
- ^ "Kevin Rice's ANGUISH LANGUISH PAGE". Archived from the original on January 6, 2013. Retrieved 18 Jan 2013.
- ^ "Parlor sport". Sports Illustrated: 25–26. 16 August 1954.
- ^ "Events & Discoveries". Sports Illustrated. 20 August 1956.