This is my first post.
I have been wondering. If a bird is flying and for some reason all of a sudden falls, would he (or she) be falling “out of midair” or “from midair” and why? This question has been bothering me for ever now. I’d love to hear any good answers please. 
Are you sure this belongs in the “About This Message Board” forum?
Anyway, to answer your question, a crude corpus search indicates that neither is used for what you are saying. Usually people say, fall from the sky.
Out of midair and from midair tend to be used from the perspective of someone on the ground, for example, in phrases like, pluck something out of midair, or snatch something from midair.
See these corpus results:
Either would be acceptable to this Grammar Nazi.
Welcome to the boards, hope you find your niche here!
This is an interesting question. My gut feeling was that I don’t think I would use either construction, but I wasn’t immediately sure why. Here’s where I come out, I think:
“In midair” is the most common expression, used to emphasize that when something happens, the ground is a long way below. So it’s not just a neutral location like “on the beach”. It’s emphasizing the drama of the location where something happens.
So there’s nothing grammatically wrong with either “from midair” or “out of midair”, but I think there’s a semantic issue. I don’t usually think of “midair” as a way to describe a place from which events begin to unfold, more a descriptor of a dramatic place where events unfold.
In the Google ngram data, “from midair” and “out of midair” are both very rare compared to “in midair”.
Yes, except that fall isn’t even in the top 35 verbal collocates, and the OP is specifically asking about fall. See this list of verbal collocates for in midair.
In my opinion, falling from midair and falling in midair have two different connotations. Falling in midair implies, to me, that the falling object might recover and resume normal flight. Falling from midair implies the fall will continue until the falling object strikes the ground.
As you can see, I feel falling from midair is preferable to falling out of midair. But I can’t point to any grammatical reason for this so it’s probably just a personal preference.
You don’t need personal preference: look at the data in a corpus, like COCA, and you see that neither is found collocating with fall. As I said above, from midair and out of midair tend to collocate with verbs like snatch, etc.
ETA: This isn’t a question of grammar, either, but usage.
Moderator Action
Welcome to the SDMB, PineappleShots63.
Since this is not a question about the message board itself, let’s move this to a more appropriate forum.
Moving thread from ATMB to GQ.
I don’t see much difference, and this isn’t a grammar question, but a personal choice of wording question. Use the one you like most.
Out of is usually associated with “thin air”. I’m no grammar Nazi. They wouldn’t have me as I didn’t know who to send the application to.
To me, “out of mid air” denotes something appearing suddenly. E.g., like a magician making a dove appear out of mid air. It can also denote a metaphorical event. E.g., “I got dumped out of mid air.”
Yes, “thin air” might be a better fit, but “mid air” is a perfectly cromulent variation.
Again, I’ll just repeat that the OP is asking specifically about the adverbial phrase which collocates with “fall,” so speculations comparing the isolated phrases, or about other verbs, is not really addressing the issue.
While that’s true, as a native English speaker, both forms sounds just fine and unobjectionable to me. That said, yes, “fell from the sky” and “fell out of the sky” is a far, far, far more common way of expressing this.
Looking through Google Books, I do see the form “fell from midair” returns 60 hits and “fall from midair” returns 42. “Fell out of midair” returns 8 and “fall out of midair” returns 9. So, not unheard of, but certainly on the rare side.
ETA: Plus looks like also another 109 for “fell from mid-air” and 46 for “fall from mid-air” as well as another 5 and 10 respectively for “fall out of midair” and “fell out of midair.” (Looking through the examples, I see one where I would definitely not use “fell from the sky” and prefer “fell from mid-air” which concerns a spider falling from midair.)
Both are wrong … they are verbose … attend please:
The bird fell.
The bird fell out of midair.
The bird fell from midair.
The first sentence is complete, no need to add all the extra words … from where else would the bird fall? …
A tree? My hand? Its cage?
And there is nothing “wrong” about verbosity. English is not about communicating thoughts in the most efficient manner possible. Sometimes you want the extra words for clarity, rhythm, cadence, rhyme, emphasis, etc.
And I posted what I use. I don’t need a cite for what I explicitly identified as a personal opinion.
Sorry. Those last two examples of “midair” should be “mid-air,” of course.
The bird is flying, and then fell … would the bird be flying in your hand or flying in a tree … the context makes it clear the bird is falling out of the sky …
“Verbosity typically means the act of adding extra words to your prose that provide no relevant information or are useless to what the meaning of the communication is all about.”
“Verbosity means adding useless words.”
See the difference … “typically”, “act”, “prose”, “information”, “communication”, “about” etc etc etc are all superfluous to the expression of my thought … they’re just verbal diarrhea … it’s not always wrong, but it certainly can be …
The OP didn’t say … so I think the default is Standard Written English … which prohibits verbosity … other forms of English have other rules … conversational English allows “you know” multiple times every sentence …
“That there bird done did, like, fall out of midair, you know.”
One wouldn’t think twice hearing that sentence … but reading it just grates on the nerves I think …
I agree with those who’ve told you (in different ways) that “mid-air” doesn’t belong in what you’re trying to say. Another way of explaining the same point: it isn’t newsworthy when a flying bird falls from mid-air, because all flying birds that fall do that. It’s a little like saying “This guy drove into the parking lot, stopped, and then guess where he got out of - his car!”
You are right, and I didn’t mean to say that one must. It’s interesting that apparently many here will accept the OP’s two options, but they are not used very often.
