Life in a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. B.M.A.T.C., and Etruscan typewriter erasers. Blogged by David Gorsline.
Thursday, 24 June 2004 
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There's a lyric in Cole Porter's "You're the Top" that employs a unusual figure of speech, to the end of a forced but clever rhyme:
BILLY: You're a rose,/You're Inferno's Dante.
RENO: You're the nose/On the great Durante. The term for this turns out to be hypallage ("shifting the application of words"), a special case of hyperbaton, any of the figures of speech based on transpositions. I suppose you could also call this metonymy ("reference to something or someone by naming one of its attributes"). I can't think of another attested example in which a nominative noun and a genitive noun exchange case. posted: 4:17:32 PM |
 D. Gorsline, Proprietor
   
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