Voldemort conjures a preposition
In an article entitled “Prepositional Anxiety and Voldemort’s Wand” Language Log takes J. K. Rowling to task for this sentence, spoken by her evil wizard, Mr. Riddle:
My wand of yew did everything of which I asked it, Severus, except to kill Harry Potter.
The article maintains that the “of which” construction is the result of a “superstition” against ending a clause with a preposition; the origin of the prepophobia is attributed to Dryden.
Well, fine. The article goes on to assert that “the normal way to render this in Standard English would be one of these”:
My wand did everything which I asked of it.
My wand did everything that I asked of it.
My wand did everything I asked of it.
Supposedly, Voldemort has transposed the “of” from its penultimate position and placed it in front of the word “which” (a relative pronoun according to traditional grammatical parsing). The result is a sentence that sounds just a little contorted, a bit twisted, and … hey, wait a second, this is dialogue, right? Spoken by Mr. Twisted himself? Hmmmm.
By the way, where I come from from where I whence I to my ear the “normal way” to render this would be
My wand did everything I asked
(a sentence that in most cases is better thought than uttered aloud).
Posted: August 27th, 2007 under language.
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