Hypallage (hy-pal’-la-ge): Shifting the application of words. Mixing the order of which words should correspond with which others. Also, sometimes, a synonym for metonymy (see Quintilian).
“To the barn I went.” This was a turn of phrase of the most delicate sort. For many exegetes it was like scraping chalk across a blackboard. I might say “Hence, to the barn go we.” These turns of phrase were so irksome to so many whose lives were tangled and enslaved to grammar and syntax, two elements of speech that spelled the ruin of many an otherwise creative man. Trapped in a canyon of solicitude respectfully, yea, even obediently, traversed in the same fashion, starting as a rut and ending as an abyss. It made a lackluster bottomless hole in the surface of meaning, with a smiley face as a lid keeping out the light and weather, the sun, and moon, and sky.
It has the breath of a canary in a cage, endlessly discerning death—endlessly perching on the corpse that’s melting in a the gaseous stench of circumstance, the determining factor in what we believe—what we wallow in, rolling around squid-like, tentacles stretching and winding in the slime of probability, what some consider an oasis free from the arthritis of truth—the stiff-jointed fist that pounds on your beliefs making a lop-sided circle of meaning.
From day one to the end, we are, I am, prodded linguistically to put this before that, canning the alphabet over and over again, and spilling it and recanning it by the same process to the same end: repetition is the soul of spelling—always, all the time spelled like this, over and over as long as the word may exist. After all, we want to make sense to each other so we can threaten each other, make alibis, lie, pervert the course of Justice, and the handful of good things that I can’t even name.
So, it’s a mess. And, no doubt, I’ve missed the mark here. I’m like my neighbor’s dog that barks every night for a half-hour for no reason and then mercifully shuts up. So, now I will shut up.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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