Enallage
The deliberate use of a grammatically 'wrong' form for rhetorical effect.
Enallage (Greek, 'interchange') is the deliberate substitution of one grammatical form for another that would ordinarily be considered incorrect — a plural for a singular, a past for a present, a first-person for a third-person. The effect, when the substitution is well chosen, is a sudden freshness or emphasis that a grammatically 'correct' version could not achieve.
Advertising is the great modern user of the figure. 'Think different' (Apple) uses an adjective where an adverb is expected. 'We was robbed' (Joe Jacobs, on a 1932 boxing decision) uses a plural verb form with a plural subject in a way standard English disallows, and lodges in the ear precisely because it does. Shakespeare uses enallage constantly — 'is there no pity sitting in the clouds' — as does the King James Bible.
Enallage overlaps with solecism (any grammatical error), but the two are not identical: a solecism is an accident, an enallage is on purpose. The distinction is not always clear to readers, which means the writer must earn the reading of intentionality — usually by placing the deviant form in a position of emphasis and surrounding it with otherwise controlled prose.
Used well, enallage marks a voice. Used badly, it looks like a proofreading error. The safest test: read the sentence aloud without the enallage, in its 'correct' form. If the corrected sentence is duller, keep the enallage.
“Think different.”
Keep reading the glossary
The use of one part of speech as another — most often a noun used as a verb.
A newly coined word or expression, often minted to capture something the existing vocabulary cannot.
The comic misuse of a word for one that sounds like it — a staple of characterisation and unintended honesty.
Latin for 'thus' — used in quotes to mark an error reproduced from the original.