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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
From Time magazine, July 24, 2006:
“The Hamas political leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniya, who fashions himself a relative moderate, became Prime Minister, and set about trying to prove Hamas could govern.”
I have often heard and seen this. From the context, this clearly does not mean “he used to be a radical, but has fashioned himself into a relative moderate. . . ” A true eggcorn, probably attributable to the rarity of “fancy” as a verb in American English (“fancy x up” aside.) Unlike the English, we don’t say “I fancy her,” “I took a fancy to pictures of that sort,” etc. So “to fancy oneself,” meaning to “imagine or pride oneself, probably falsely,” is liable to misinterpretation.
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