Arnold raced out of the door, and started…
In its time, it was once reported, this was one of the most often-read lines of fiction in the English language: it is the sentence fragment shown in a brief close-up shot of mystery novelist Jessica Fletcher's typewriter in the opening credits of Murder, She Wrote from 1984 to 1991. You can see it here.
Even conceding that "door" can be used as a perfectly legitimate synonym for "doorway," this always bothered me. One may race out of a room, and one may race through a doorway, but I don't see how Arnold could have raced out of a door—unless perhaps he had been standing still in the middle of the doorway before suddenly "racing" out of it, which seems unlikely.
What's interesting is that "Arnold raced out the door" doesn't bother me as much without the of, perhaps because I'm subconsciously putting an implied through into the sentence: "Arnold raced out [through] the door." Even so, I was surprised and amused to see that, out of all the examples they could have chosen, Merriam-Webster illustrates its definition of out as a preposition with the phrase "ran out the door." (Were the writers of this definition Murder, She Wrote fans, I wonder?) This doesn't seem to leave much room for my interpretation.
How should the clause "Arnold raced out of the door" be evaluated? Is it ungrammatical, grammatical but poor form, or grammatical with no reservations?
Best Answer
Consider the following three sentences.
In the first sentence out is a preposition meaning 'through to the outside'. This is entirely unproblematic: he was in a room or building, and he raced out of it through the door(way).
In formal English the second sentence is equally clear: out is an adverb meaning 'moving or appearing to move away from a particular place, especially one that is enclosed', and the sentence means that he raced out of the doorway in which he had been standing. I shouldn’t be at all surprised, however, to find that some people use it synonymously with (1).
Since 'doorway' is one perfectly standard meaning of door, and since it is more than a little difficult to stand in a physical door, (3) is formally synonymous with (2). However, many people, evidently including at least one writer for Murder, She Wrote, use it synonymously with (1). For those people out of has in effect become a compound preposition meaning 'through to the outside' as well as the combination of adverb and preposition found in the formal interpretation of (2). I suspect that this, like in back of for behind, is more common in the US than in the UK. In the US, at least, it’s common enough to qualify as normal English, though there are also speakers like me who would never use it because it’s ungrammatical in their idiolects.