"I need to be touched with your fingers ?"
I just wanna see that it is corret or not .. Or
"I need to be touched by your fingers ?"
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"I need you to touch me with your fingers" is what sounds right to me.– Tushar RajMay 25, 2015 at 22:28
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There is nothing wrong with "I need to be touched with your fingers." There are easily a dozen different ways you could phrase that (and I probably would have used "by"), but the choice is more an issue of poetic judgment than what is "correct" or "idiomatic".– Hot LicksMay 25, 2015 at 22:41
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But they both sound a little creepy. If she has already touched you before in a particular way or place, something like "I love it when you {run your fingers through my hair/rub my neck/hold my hand/whatever} sounds better than the vague yet somehow lecherous "I need to be touched with/by your fingers."– Brian HitchcockMay 26, 2015 at 0:20
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The difference in meaning is subtle. "Touched with" tends to emphasize that the speaker needs to be touched with your specific fingers, and no others. "Touched by", on the other hand, tends more to imply simply that the speaker needs to be touched, and, OK, maybe your fingers will do the trick. (But a lot depends on the context, of course.)– Hot LicksMay 26, 2015 at 1:15
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1 Answer
Charles Fillmore described the grammatical difference (using different examples) this way. "I was touched by your fingers" is the passive of a sentence with an intrumental subject: "Your fingers touched me." "I was touched with your fingers" is the passive of a sentence with an unspecified agent subject: "(Someone) touched me with your fingers." Perhaps that unspecified person was you, or one might think of a serial killer who is in the habit of removing his victims' fingers as prizes, then steals into homes of former victims' lovers and uses previously collected fingers to waken them.
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This is a good explanation of the grammatical difference -- +1 -- but it doesn't give a good sense of when someone would actually use one sentence vs. the other. (If ever.)– ruakhMay 26, 2015 at 6:56
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"Your fingers touched me" also does not specify the toucher... so there seems to be no difference to me.– Amy BMay 26, 2015 at 18:28
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@DavidB, but it does. "Toucher" is a nominalization of "__ touches", and it refers to the subject -- the one or the thing which does the touching. If your fingers touched me, then your fingers were touchers of me. But since the subject of "touch" is ambiguously either an agent or an instrument, that ambiguity carries across to the derived noun "toucher".– Greg LeeMay 26, 2015 at 19:53