Voldemort's hypercorrection: who dunnit?

If your response is "You what?" then either you didn't read it, or didn't spot it or (more likely) you're bamboozled by the terminology. In any case here's the issue: on p. 655 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Voldemort says: "My wand of yew did everything of which I asked it, Severus, except to kill Harry Potter. " And yes there is something wrong with that sentence whichever school of grammar you favour: prescriptive or descriptive. It's called hypercorrection because it is apparently an attempt to 'correct' something that would not have been wrong in such a way as to produce an ill-formed sentence. Here's what's at issue.

"that inoffensive little of -- even though it has no connection to the relative pronoun, and is just sitting peacefully next to its proper object 'it' -- frightened J.K. Rowling, who decided to sweep it up and stick it next to which in the complementizer position. Or perhaps it was some anonymous copy editor who performed this little grammatical incorrection. Then again, Rowling may have consciously placed a hyperconnection in Voldemort's mouth, in order to tell us something about his character. That would be a more charitable interpretation."

And if that is still obscure, see if this helps:

Simplifying it a bit, Voldemort's sentence, rendered in Heavy English with square brackets marking the relative clause, is something like:

my wand did everything [ such that I asked that thing of it ]

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 ]

where '*' marks the canonical location of the (variable corresponding to the) relativized noun phrase.

Still not clear? Well, just note that 'asked of it' is a phrase that should not be intruded into (!)
See also here.
Language Log: Prepositional anxiety and Voldemort's wand: