It’s not that prepostions can’t be used with abstract nouns. It’s that way OUT OF is used in “Sanders is out of luck” is different than how it’s used in “the ball rolled out of the room.” In the former, “out of luck” is an idiom; it can’t be parsed word by word; it might be a single word. You could say “Sanders is unlucky” or “Sanders is unfortunate,” but you wouldn’t say “Sanders is out of fortune.” In the latter, “out of the room” can be parsed word by ; OUT OF serves to communicate the spatial relationship between “ball” and “room.”
But as I said above, my judgment that OUT OF is not a compound preposition in “out of the room” hinges on a narrow definition preposition, one meant to distinguish between usages like “OF course I’ll do it” and “He is the leader OF the team.” If you use a broader definition, OUT OF can be a compound prep. in that phrase.
I think “out of” in “out of luck” is much more like the particles used in phrasal verbs than anything else.
But I wouldn’t say that “out” means nothing in thsoe phrasem, except in the sense that the individual letters of a word mean nothing. “Timed out” has a very different meaning than “timed”; it was coiined to fill a gap in the lexicon created by new technology. Like many phrasalverbs, it’s basically a single word that is spelled as two only by orthographic convention.
This is where we disagree. The particles of phrasal verbs have no meaning except through the verb they are attached to. This is the difference between “look up to the sky” (“up” is a preposition) and “look up the word in the dictionary” (“up” is a particle). The “out” of “out of luck” isn’t a particle, and it really can’t be a particle, because it has a meaning on its own. It means, as I’ve said before, “not having something you normally do.” “Out of” isn’t really an idiomatic phrase either, in that you can be “out of” many things. With idiomatic phrases, you usually can’t do that. “In luck” is an idiomatic phrase, because it doesn’t mean the same thing as “in time” or “in paper towels” and so on.
[/QUOTE]
If you made an argument about “out of” meaning “having exhausted teh supply of” upthread, I missed it because of my bad eyes. Reading it now, I have decided that you are right and I am wrong.
In the former, “out of luck” is an idiom; it can’t be parsed word by word; it might be a single word. You could say “Sanders is unlucky” or “Sanders is unfortunate,” but you wouldn’t say “Sanders is out of fortune.”
You’d need to add an adjective: “Sanders is out of good fortune”, but then it becomes unwieldy.
I suspect that “of course” is a shortening of “a matter of course”, i.e. “I’ll do it as a matter of course” = “it’s the natural/correct/automatic thing to do”.
See, with the “out of luck” thing, when you’re “in luck,” you’re IN it. When you’re “out of luck,” you have already left. The inverse of “out of” is “into.” But we don’t talk about the liminal state of entering luck.
I actually never thought of it as outta luck, like, we’re outta cat food.
I’m wondering if the OP’s question needs to be looked at in the context of other uses of the verbs concerned. You would say (once upon a time) “I’m tiring of…”, so “tired of” makes sense as the completion of that process. But the process of becoming and ending up bored is rather different - you might be the subject of “tiring/tired”, but you’re the object of “boring/bored”: something is doing it to you.