Definition:
A figure of speech consisting of an exchange within a statement between (1) the epithets assigned to specific nouns (also known as a transferred epithet), or (2) activities associated with certain words or their complements.
Etymology:
From the Greek, "interchange"Examples and Observations:
- "Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers."
(T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land) - "There one goes, unsullied as yet, in his Pullman pride, toying--oh, boy!--with a blunderbuss bourbon, being smoked by a large cigar, riding out to the wide open spaces of the faces of his waiting audience."
(Dylan Thomas, "A Visit to America," Quite Early One Morning) - "Like enallage, hypallage is an apparent mistake. All changes of grammatical function are not valid cases of hypallage. Puttenham, who calls hypallage the changeling, points out that the user of this figure perverts meaning by shifting the application of words: ' . . . as he should say for . . . come dine with me and stay not, come stay with and me and dine not.'
"The mistake becomes a figure by expressing a meaning, albeit an unexpected one. According to Guiraud (p. 197), 'The device is related to the aesthetics of vagueness; by suppressing the relationship of necessity between determined and determinant, it tends to liberate the latter.'"
(Bernard Marie Dupriez and Albert W. Halsall, A Dictionary of Literary Devices, University of Toronto Press, 1991) - "The rhetorical figure Shakespeare uses here is hypallage, often described as the transferred epithet. His rudeness so with his authorized youth did livery falseness in a pride of truth. It is the rudeness that is authorized, not the youth; hypallage transfers the modifier (authorized) from object (rudeness) to subject (youth)."
(Lisa Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare's Will, Columbia University Press, 2002)
Pronunciation: hi-PAL-la-ge
Also Known As: transferred epithet
