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"The ring, the ring that became the Horcurx, Marvolo Gaunt said it had the Peverell coat of arms on it! I saw him waving it in the bloke from the Ministry's face, he nearly shoved it up his nose!"
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
I don't quite understand "waving it in the bloke from the Ministry's face", especially the uses of 'in' and 'from'. How should we understand it?
In someone's face roughly means in front of someone's face, but it can have an aggressive connotation:
in (one's) face
1. Physically in front of one's face.
If you stick that dead bug in my face, I'm going to come after you!
Can you believe he just slammed the door in my face like that?
(TFD)
From just tells us the person's origin, so to speak,
from
3. preposition
A person from a particular organization works for that organization.
...a representative from the Israeli embassy.
(Collins Dictionary)
So, the speaker saw him (= Marvolo Gaunt?) waving it in front of the bloke's face, the bloke who was from the Ministry.
In the comments, you ask
Does that possessive 's in "the bloke from the Ministry's face" look strange to you? Is it normal to place 's like that?
It looks a little strange because writers will generally avoid this in formal writing. However, it is possible is casual speech. And that is what the author is writing. Coincidentally, after your comment, I heard someone say, "It's in John from Ohio's car". In both cases, we understand it as
- in [John from Ohio]'s car
✓ in John's car, John who is from Ohio
✗ from [Ohio's car]- in [the bloke from the Ministry]'s face
✓ in the bloke's face, the bloke who is from the Ministry
✗ from [the Ministry's face]
The two may be not be strictly grammatical, but the structure certainly has currency in lax, spontaneous, or casual speech. And that is what the author is trying to reproduce.
What you have here, I believe, is called a Group Genitive (see Collins). See the third section for more on this.
Meaning in Context:
From Cambridge, a bloke is "a man, often one who is considered to be ordinary." This is used informally. See sheila.
In your case, Harry is saying that he saw Gaunt waving (= brandishing) the ring "in the face of a Ministry official (= Bob Ogden)."
The sentence would look something like this if you simplify it:
... waving it in the man's (= man from the Ministry) face.
... waving it in the bloke's face. The bloke from the Ministry.
... waving it in the bloke-from-the-Ministry's face. [The hyphens make it easier to read this]
... waving it in the bloke from the Ministry's face.
From this EL&U post Difference between “at someone's face” vs “in someone's face” vs “to someone's face”,
"In my face" is used when someone is confronting you, arguing with you, or pointing out that they believe you have done something wrong."
Strange or not:
To me, "bloke from the Ministry's face" seems a bit strange with regards to the possessive ('s) - it is too far removed from "bloke". This might be acceptable in informal contexts (e.g., casual conversation among friends).
If "the bloke from the ministry" is being used as a nick name or a title in this context, then it could be treated like a noun.
On Group Genitive:
There are other examples that resemble the possessive (called a group genitive) in your case. See Formation of possessive construction for "the king of Spain's", "the man we saw yesterday's", and "the King of England's" (Miles provided this link in the comments).
See this ThoughtCo. article: Group Genitive
In English grammar, the group genitive is a possessive construction (such as "the man next door's cat") in which the clitic appears at the end of a noun phrase whose final word is not its head or not its only head. Also called a group possessive or phrasal possessive.
Group genitive constructions are more common in everyday speech than in formal writing.
Also see this EL&U post Adding a possessive to a singular noun phrase that ends in a plural noun for similar strange examples: "The clock under the curtain’s hour hand broke off", "The clock mounted on wheels' hour hand broke off", and "the Queen of England’s hat".
The EL&U post cites this source material: The English “Group Genitive” is a Special Clitic. I don't have the expertise to understand the technical aspect of the paper. But it does have similar expressions: "The man in the hall’s taste in wallpaper is appalling."
The cause of the confusion in this sentence is that the speaker doesn't recall the name of the person he is speaking about. The person's actual name in the story is Bob Ogden. Let us therefore reconstruct the sentence with that information:
I saw him waving it in Bob's face, he nearly shoved it up his nose!
This sentence is much simpler. It simply means that Marvolo Gaunt was aggressively showing Bob the ring in a very up-close way. So much so that the ring nearly went up Bob's nose. However, because the speaker does not know Bob's name, he has to substitute a generic noun – "bloke". This simply means "a man". In the context of a conversation referring to a specific person, it is usually not very helpful to say "the bloke" or "the man", because the listener will likely not know which specific person is being referred to. Indeed, that is why a name would be used in the first place.
In this case, the speaker uses the best description he can come up with at the moment to try to limit the pool of possible people he can be referring to. Thus he says "the bloke from the Ministry" – i.e. it wasn't any random man, it was the specific man from the Ministry. "Man from _______" would not be an uncommon mode of speech at all. You might say "the man from Australia" to refer to someone who had come from Australia. In this case, as described earlier in the story, the man in question had come from the Ministry.
Knowing this we can now replace "Bob" from above with the phrase that was used as a substitute for his name, and we get the original sentence:
I saw him waving it in the bloke from the Ministry's face
The 's is still necessary to show the possessive. There is nowhere else to put it, so it goes at the end of the entire phrase (bloke from the Ministry) that represents the person who is possessing.
The construction "in the bloke from the Ministry's face" feels awkward because the posessive is so far from the owning noun. If it were "in the face of the bloke from the Ministry" it'd be less ambiguous but it'd feel more stilted. "Waving it in the Minister's face" might be inaccurate if it's a low-level official.
For an informal, young speaker like Ron, the given speech seems appropriate.
There is an editing error in this text:
In English, you wave something in someone's face.
Ergo: there are two possibilities here.
I'm sorry but unlike all the answers, I will just say: the English as quoted is not grammatical. Her editors failed to catch it. That's all.
"wave [something] in the face of [someone]
They seemed defiant, waving cell phones in the faces of seven uniformed officers. The New Yorker
FADE IN to CAROLINE waving a Post-it in the face of her beleaguered mother. The Guardian
They could not have waved a redder flag in the face of some scholars. The New York Times
It was like waving a red flag in the face of the Redskin football fanatics. The Huffington Post
The base idiom here is: to wave something in someone's face
Bear these points in mind:
Both Hermione and Harry's speech is usually very clear.
- He does not make sentences that do not read well.
- JK Rowling herself has stated she makes mistakes. Mostly plot or information mistakes.
- It is as likely, therefore, that she also made a few other slips ups.
- Harry has RP and all his speech is grammatically standard.
I did not mention grammar in my answer. I said the text is not idiomatic English.
Idioms are adjusted to fit an utterance:
The idiom here is: to wave something in someone's face
Those last three sentences above make the sentence cohere with the idiomatic usage of: to wave something in someone's face.
