My wand of yew did everything of which I asked it, Severus, except to kill Harry Potter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Well, fine. The article goes on to assert that “the normal way to render this in Standard English would be one of these”:<\/p>\n
My wand did everything which I asked of it.
\nMy wand did everything that I asked of it.
\nMy wand did everything I asked of it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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.<\/p>\n
By the way, where I come from<\/strike> from where I<\/strike> whence I<\/strike> to my ear the “normal way” to render this would be<\/p>\n My wand did everything I asked<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
(a sentence that in most cases is better thought than uttered aloud).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"volemort](\"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog-images-07\/voldemort.jpg\" "\\"volemort")
<\/p>\n