Hypallage

Hypallage (Greek, 'interchange'), sometimes called the transferred epithet, is the figure by which an adjective or descriptive phrase is applied not to the noun it logically qualifies but to a nearby noun. 'The ploughman homeward plods his weary way' — the way is not weary; the ploughman is. 'A sleepless night' — the night is not sleepless; the sleeper is.

The device is old. Virgil and Horace use it freely. It survives in modern poetry and in a small set of frozen English idioms ('a happy hour', 'an angry gesture'). The effect is a small oddness that draws attention: the reader registers, briefly, that the adjective is in the wrong place, and in the act of relocating it experiences the described quality more vividly than a straight construction would produce.

Hypallage is closely related to enallage (substitution of one grammatical form for another) and to metonymy (substitution of a related term for the intended one). It differs from both in that the misplacement is specifically of a modifier and its noun.

The figure is best used sparingly and in poetry or high-style prose. In workaday writing it can look like sloppiness — a modifier that has drifted from its noun by accident. If the reader is not clearly cued that the transfer is deliberate, the figure fails.