Q. Hi. I’m writing about your answer to the question of capitalizing “out of” in the last round of Q&As. You said, “Chicago style would be . . . Getting out of Saigon,” treating “out of” as a preposition (as listed in Merriam-Webster).
But in that example, I would have parsed “get[ting] out” as a phrasal verb, also listed in M-W, and capped the preposition “out” according to CMOS 8.159 rule 3, because it is acting adverbially: “Getting Out of Saigon.” Just wondering if you’ve heard a similar argument from other readers. Thanks for considering.
A. A few readers have written to us about this, and we think yours is the best analysis—much better than ours, which failed to consider that “getting out” might take priority over “out of.”
We’ve now added a bracketed update to our original answer. Thank you for taking the time to challenge us on this. The Q&A—not to mention CMOS—depends as much on our readers’ questions as it does on their collective editorial wisdom.