| enallage (rhetoric) |
| Definition: Substituting grammatically different but semantically equivalent constructions. |
| Example:
The following uses enallage to transform the active to the passive: (1) "I ate a big honking Mac" (active) (2) "The big honking Mac was eaten by me" (passive) |
| Etymology: The word means "change" in Greek |
| Oxford English Dictionary: Its first citation in its rhetorical sense is from 1736: "Enallage, a figure whereby we change or invert the order of the terms in a discourse." (Bailey) |