adjectives - My shoes can't think; how can they be sensible?

Recently as some of us were getting ready to take a walk through the snow, somebody said to me "you're wearing sensible shoes". Now my shoes haven't developed cognitive abilities so far as I know (and I spend enough time with them that I think I would notice), but everyone there knew what this means. It's a common phrase in my experience, but it got me wondering. The adjective sensible here, while syntactically bound to the noun shoes, really applies to another noun in the sentence instead. Is there a term for this sort of modifier migration, or is this sentence technically ungrammatical?

I checked dictionary.com for alternate or obscure meanings of sensible but found none, and a Google search on the phrase turned up uses but no explanations. I also don't think this construct is limited to this particular phrase, but I don't have any more clever ideas.

Answer

An adjective modifying the "wrong" word in a sentence is known as a transferred epithet. This can be used for poetic or humourous effect, or, as in this case, the epithet may have become so strongly associated with the noun that it has no particular literary effect on the listener.

A simple example is "I spent a sleepless night" (it is I who was sleepless, not the night). My English teacher was rather fond of "a schoolboy once again in shivering shorts" from John Betjeman's Original Sin on the Sussex Coast. Of course, the schoolboy is shivering, not his shorts.

Wikipedia has a brief entry on the more general hypallage. I have rarely heard this term used in reference to English grammar or literature.

As noted by other answerers sensible shoes in particular has jumped the chasm from literary device to creating an alternative accepted meaning of sensible. Another example of such a jump is curious, as in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.