Something I’ve seen more and more often over the last couple years is somebody saying that they are “bored of X”. That just looks and sounds “wrong” to me … and I can’t say why.
“I’m tired of this” = correct
"I’m bored of this: = incorrect … but why?
On the surface, “tired” and “bored” seem to be the same kind of word, except they’re not. Sadly, it’s been more than 30 years since my last English class. While I can write and speak with correct grammar, I can no longer cite the rules and specific “parts of speech”.
“I am tired” and “I am bored” are all good.
“This is tiring” and “this is boring” are fine.
OTOH, you might say, “That guy is a bore”, but you would never say, “That guy is a tire”.
As for being “bored”, I am perfectly happy with “I am bored by this” or “I am bored with this”. But “I am bored of this” just strikes me as terribly incorrect.
English prepositional idioms. They ARE idioms because each word taken literally does not necessarily reflect the sentiment. “In luck” but “Out OF luck”.
I think ‘with’ is the proper equivalent, actually. You can be either tired or bored ‘by’, but you can’t be tired with, any more than you can be bored of.
I don’t know the answer but I have a similar problem - there’s a sign on a shopfront I pass regularly that proclaims an organisation is ‘supporting people with disabilities participate in everyday life’. This is obviously jaw clenchingly wrong, and should be ‘supporting people to participate’, yet I can’t see a problem if it were ‘helping people participate’, which ought to be the equivalent.
I look forward to any answer to the conundrum that improves on ‘the English, she is weird’ but we may not get one…
English has plenty of logical rules. All languages do, or they’d be useless.
The primary rule in English is that the function of nouns and pronouns in a clause is determined by word order. The subject comes first, then the verb, then the indrecit object if any, then by the direct object if any. Variations from this pattern have to be marked by speech and punctuation ion in writing, and some variants are not allowed; and you can’t vary constantly without becoming unintelligible. Determiners always precede the nouns they modify; adjectives generally but not always do; adverbs are flexible. Nouns are inflected in only two ways (for possession and plurality) because the cases are marked by word order. It’s elegant and logica–so logical that you’re hardly aware of it., because it’s transparent to any native speaker.
I could say the same thing about Russian’s cases, of course, which seem complicated to someone learning it as a second language but are easily mastered as a milk tongue.
If you think English has no logic, then tell me why “Margaret hit Hawkeye in the face with the frying pan” means something entirely different but easily distinguishable from “Hawkeye hit Margaret in the face with the frying pan,” while “Winchester the surgeon bald cook for yelled burning for papers burning at” is gobbledygook.
“Out of” in a phrase like “I took the tolls OUT OF THE BOX” is a compound preposition; it marks a spatial relationship. You could substitute man other concrete nouns for “box” – closet, bucket, house, car, trunk – etc. But in “out of luck,” “out of” is part of an idiom that cannot be so parsed. When you’re out of luck, you haven’t moved in space or time necessarily, nor changed a compositional or possessive relation.You can’r be “out of algebra” or most other abstract nboun the same way (though you can be out of time or out of money.)
I am not saying that “out of” cannot be a compound preposition; I am saying it “out of” is not that in the phrase “out of luck” Similarly, “to” is a prepostion in “Go to the store” but not in “to be or not to be.”
TLDR: English words can serve as more than one part of speech. The more commo they are, the more likely it is that they do.
I’m not sure I agree. You can be “out of” any plural noun and most collective nouns. Physical placement is not needed for something to be a preposition. It just describes word used to connect a noun in an adjectival or adverbial manner.
I don’t disagree that the same word(s) can be different parts of speech in different circumstances. But I don’t agree that having limited utility changes the part of speech, nor that idioms don’t generally conform to the parts of speech.
I don’t see how “out of luck” is any different from “out of hamburgers.” Sure, “out of algebra” is weird, but it’s weird because algebra is not something you can run out of.
I think what we’re disagreeing about is the definition of preposition. I would restrict it to nondeclinable words uto cast their objects in relations of movement, postion, time, change, composition, possession, and origin; by that definition, words whose apparent object is an abstract noun like “luck” are not being used as prepositions. Part of the reason I draw that distinction is that usages I listed above are typically reversible, but those with abstract nouns are not.If I can go into the house, I can come out of the house; if I can set my phone on the time, I can set my phone under it. But phrases like “out of luck” don’t generally work the same way. The meaning is cannot be parsed from the meanings of the individual words, but rather of the whole phrase.
Thus it seems to me that in “I’m out of time” OUT OF is not serving the same function as in “She came out of the house.” OUT OF, in the former case, is like “to” in “I’m going to allow you tell your story.” Those TOs aren’t prepositions; the first i part of an idiom synonymous with “will,” and the second is required by convention when “allow” is used as an infinitive. (Note that “I will let you tell your story” means the same thing and is equally grammatical but lacks the TOs.)
OUT OF is sometimes a compound preposition,sometimes a pair of particles.
Having said all that: if your definition of prepositions is broader than mine, then you may consider OUT OF in “out of luck” to be a compound preposition. It’s kindof like arguing whether lesbians are gay. Some people say that as a noun “gay” means “homosexual human being,” but others restrict it to “homosexual man.”
I know how the OP feels. “Close with,” to describe an emotional closeness, as opposed to “close to,” to describe proximity, is a usage that has arisen in just the last 20 years or so, and it bugs my left brain, even while my right brain says that it is actually good to differentiate between the two meanings of closeness. I still use “close to” for anything, emotional closeness, and proximity, but I’m really glad I’m not a high school English teacher, who has to decide whether or not to correct this in students’ papers. It’s perfectly good vernacular, and will probably be accepted in formal writing in another 10-20 years-- in other words, high school students in 2016 should be able to use it in their future with alacrity for all kinds of writing.
This is one thing that declined languages have on us. There are a few irregular words you have to memorize, but they are common, and you practice them a lot. Every intransitive verb in English takes a preposition, some take more than one, depending on subtlety of meaning (“in the hospital” vs. “at the hospital”), and they all just have to be memorized. If a foreigner who speaks fairly fluent English is going to say something weird, it’s usually going to have to do with a preposition.
Bored of or bored with both sound OK to me. I think there’s a slight tendency in my locality for it to be bored of [a tangible thing or a person] and bored with [an activity or situation], but only slightly.
One construction that’s bothering me in the same way as I think bored of is bothering the OP is: “Where to next?” (it appears on the default homepage of the Microsoft Edge browser).
Intellectually, I know it means “Where [do you want to go] to next?”, but I keep reading ‘to’ in the Hamlet sense. To next, or not to next. That is the question.
I’m not sure I’m following your reasoning here. You say that “out of” in the sense of “not having something that you normally do” is an irreversible thing, and then you say that because of this you can’t figure out what “out of” means by parsing the individual words. I don’t think that follows.
First, you most certainly can use prepositions with abstract ideas. People fall into a canyon, but also fall into insanity. People can be out of their country, but also out of their mind. A book can be about concrete, but also about love. And so on. I don’t think that there is anything different going here grammatically. Second, prepositions generally encompass more than the things you mention on the list. For example, “except” is a preposition par excellence, and it has nothing to do with movement, position, time, change, composition, possession, or origin. So are “against,” “than,” and “like” to name a few.
“Out” has more than one meaning. One of them is “not contained by something.” Another is, as I said above, “not having something you normally do.” In this sense, “out” is an adjective. And as others have mentioned, you can be out of many things: luck, time, paper towels, ice, anything consumable really. Combine that adjective with “of” and you get a compound preposition, as the OED says.
“Out” can be a particle. For example, “The web page timed out,” “The officers checked out the situation,” “Did you think I wouldn’t find out?” Here the “out” means nothing except through its association with another word.
