That's not what a strawman is. I never said that such a view was wrong; I said that it was a philosophical point over which we would not be able to agree. Note

That's not what a strawman is. I never said that such a view was wrong; I said that it was a philosophical point over which we would not be able to agree. Note that I was not directing the argument to something I could knock down; I was trying to identify a potentially terminal issue and "agree to disagree". I was also communicating my view of what was happening. And I'm glad I did, because you are correct and it was a mistaken view. You never implied "dangling prepositions" as a problem; that was something I had in my head which you hadn't said. In the end, I think we are stuck in a hole that Wikipedia actually summarizes quite nicely, so I'll just quote it here. The topic is the use of the terminology "phrasal verb", emphasis is all original: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrasal_verb#Some_notes_on_terminology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrasal_verb#Some_notes_on_ter... "The value of this choice and its alternatives (including separable verb for Germanic languages) is debatable. In origin the concept is based on translation linguistics; as many single-word English and Latinate words are translatable by a phrasal verb complex in English, therefore the logic is that the phrasal verb complex must be a complete semantic unit in itself. One should consider in this regard that the actual term phrasal verb suggests that such constructions should form phrases. In most cases however, they clearly do not form phrases. Hence the very term phrasal verb is misleading and a source of confusion, which has motivated some to reject the term outright." I think I'm sitting squarely in the latter camp described above. My analysis is that these are not phrasal at all, and so I think that's where this debate is actually sitting. (And conveniently, that quote also directly indicates Germanic separable verbs as alternative terminology.) So, to summarize, I think this is one of those fine times (that seems to happen so often on the Internet) where we saw some sort of disagreement, but were really agreeing on everything but terminology.