A hypallage is a figure of speech in which the syntactic relationship between two words is interchanged, resulting in unspoken personification of an inanimate or abstract noun, writes Roopa Banerjee

Every time you are wished ‘Good Morning,’ you are hearing a hypallage. A morning has no feelings, good or bad, but it is you who says it’s good. The epithet is transferred from you to the morning. Similarly, when a friend says she had a ‘restless night’, the night wasn’t restless, but the person who was awake through it.

A hypallage is a figure of speech in which the syntactic relationship between two words is interchanged. It usually results in the unspoken personification of an inanimate or abstract noun. Hypallage is also known as a transferred epithet.

The word hypallage is derived from ancient Greek — hypo means “under” and allássein “to interchange”. The descriptive hypallage was coined in 1586. Early examples are seen in ancient Greek poetry with phrases such as “the winged sound of whirling,” i.e, “the sound of whirling wings” (Aristophanes, Birds 1198), and Horace’s “angry crowns of kings” (Odes).

We use hypallage more often than we realise in everyday conversation. When you say, “That careless remark left her crying through the night,” you are actually saying that the person who made the remark was careless, but instead you have transferred that failing to the ‘remark’ from the person.

Hypallage frequently produces a metaphor. If we say, “He danced the happy road home,” the suggestion is that the person is happy and thus everything else, even the lifeless road, is infected by his happiness.

George Puttenham (1529–1590), an English writer and literary critic, described hypallage as a ‘changeling’ as the exchange of words changes the “true construction and application” of a statement, so that “the sense is quite perverted and made very absurd.”

Hypallages are used frequently in books, plays, and films. “While he’s waiting, Richard pops a nervous handful of salted nuts into his mouth” is an interesting hypallage used in This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Homes. The salted nuts, obviously, are not nervous and it is Richard who is struggling with his nerves! In the poem The Thought Fox by Ted Hughes, in the phrase “Beside the clock’s loneliness,” it is the poet who is lonely, not the clock.

Similarly, the phrase “Corruption reaps the young …” in the poem Feud by Theodore Roethke uses hypallage by interchanging the subject and object — corruption does not reap the young, but the young reap corruption. Alfred E Housman uses hypallage in his poem On the Idle Hill of Summer when he writes “On the idle hill of summer/Sleepy with the flow of streams/Far I hear…” where the word ‘idle’ defines the narrator, and not the hill.

P.G. Wodehouse fans will recognise many instances of this literary device in his books. “I lighted a thoughtful cigarette and, dismissing Archimedes for the nonce, allowed my mind to dwell once more on the ghastly jam into which I had been thrust by young Stiffy’s ill-advised behaviour” in The Code of the Woosters, is a delightful example of hypallage.

T.S. Eliot also used hypallage in his poem The Waste Land — “Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding a little life with dried tubers.”

To sum up, Pierre Guiraud, the French Linguist says it best: “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.”