Tickle your fancy

Posted by ESC on February 28, 2001

In Reply to: Whatever tickles your fancy posted by R. Berg on February 27, 2001

: : I've heard a few times the expression:
: : "Whatever tickles your fancy." I use it to mean: whatever one likes. Could anyone please provide some examples of origin and meaning for this expression? Thanks a lot!
: : Jeery

: It DOES mean "whatever one likes." To American sensibilities this expression doesn't make much sense if we are thinking about the individual words. I believe it makes more sense given some British meanings of "fancy" that aren't current in the W. Hemisphere. Extracts (condensed) from the Oxford English Dictionary:

: --Caprice, changeful mood; an instance of this, a caprice, a whim. "I have a fancy we go out to-day"

: --Capricious or arbitrary preference; individual taste; an inclination, liking, esp. in phrases "to take a fancy to," "to catch the fancy of." "The . . . tune caught the fancy of the nation."

: Phrases like "cat fanciers" and "cat fancy" are related to these senses of "fancy."

TICKLE YOUR FANCY - "The Wordsworth Book of Euphemisms" by Judith S. Neaman and Carole G. Silver (Wordsworth Editions Ltd., Hertfordshire) under the entry for "Male identified or Oriented. Homosexual (male) says: ".A Molly . A lavender boy and a Nancy, Miss Nancy, Nance or Nancy Boy. The name Nancy has given rise to the British rhyming slang expression 'a tickle your fancy' (after World War II)."

The Dictionary of Cliches by James Rogers (Ballantine Books, New York, 1985) has an earlier origin: "Tickle your fancy. Please, divert or amuse you. It is a more delicate image than the companion phrase 'strike your fancy.' Yet in 1774 Abraham Tucker characterized the thought as vulgar. In 'The Light of Nature Pursued' he wrote of animals 'whose play had a quality of striking the joyous perception, or, as we vulgarly, say, tickling the fancy."