“She waited through an impatient afternoon.” The afternoon cannot feel impatience, yet the sentence is easy to understand. A quality belonging to the person has travelled into the description of the time she experiences.
This is an invented example of a transferred epithet, a familiar form of hypallage. Silva Rhetoricae at Brigham Young University describes hypallage more broadly as shifting the application of words or the relationships between them. The term covers more than one neat adjective trick, so the particular sentence matters more than memorising a label.
Move the description back
Try rewriting the example as “She was impatient while she waited that afternoon.” The information is similar, but its distribution changes. In the first version, impatience seems to colour the whole interval. In the second, it is stated directly as a quality of the person.
Neither version is automatically better. The first may suit a passage immersed in a character’s experience; the second may suit an explanation that needs clarity. Reading the versions aloud can reveal differences in pace and emphasis that a definition alone will not show.
Keep an observation beside the terminology
When you encounter a possible example in a novel or poem, write down three things: the word carrying the description, the person or thing that might logically possess it, and the effect of that transfer. If you cannot explain the effect, leave the label provisional.
For another original exercise, compare “He crossed the nervous room” with “He crossed the room nervously.” The first could suggest an atmosphere shared by several occupants. The second directs attention to one person’s manner. Context would decide whether the first is a useful transfer, another figurative relationship or simply unclear writing.
That uncertainty is productive. Figures of speech can overlap, and a phrase does not have to fit a single classroom box to deserve attention. The question is what the wording asks the reader to connect.
Use the device sparingly in your own notes
Choose an ordinary scene and write it plainly before experimenting with one transferred description. Then remove any phrase that makes the reader work without adding something. A carefully placed epithet can allow a mood to spread across a sentence; several competing transfers can obscure who is doing or feeling what.
The reward of learning hypallage is a sharper ear for that small movement of meaning, whether or not you ever write the term in a margin again.