What does "trip the light fantastic" mean?

Question

It's been awhile.

Answer 1

Depends.

Answer 2

It means to ballroom dance.  The quaint phrase recalls the romantic days of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

Answer 3

To "trip the light fantastic" is to dance nimbly or lightly, or to move in a pattern to musical accompaniment.

Answer 4

Trip the light fantastic

Meaning

To dance, especially in an imaginative or 'fantastic' manner.

Origin

This apparently obscure expression originates from the works of John Milton. In the masque Comus, 1637, he used the lines:

Come, knit hands, and beat the ground,

In a light fantastic round.

By 'trip', Milton didn't mean 'catch one's feet and stumble'. The word had long been used to mean 'dance nimbly'. Chaucer used it that way as early as 1386, in The Miller's Tale:

In twenty manere koude he trippe and daunce. (In twenty ways could he trip and dance.)

Clearly, Milton was referring to dancing. He must have liked the imagery, as he used it again in the poem L'Allegro, 1645:

Sport that wrinkled Care derives,

And Laughter holding both his sides.

Come, and trip it as you go

On the light fantastic toe.

The 'light fantastic toe' was the form that was used when the phrase first circulated, as in this extract from The Times, November 1803:

"A splendid ball was also given; where the CONSUL himself tripped it on the light fantastic toe."

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/trip-...

Idioms: trip the light fantastic

Dance, as in Let's go out tonight and trip the light fantastic. This expression was originated by John Milton in L'Allegro (1632): "Come and trip it as ye go, On the light fantastick toe." The idiom uses trip in the sense of "a light, tripping step," and although fantastick was never the name of any particular dance, it survived and was given revived currency in James W. Blake's immensely popular song, The Sidewalks of New York (1894).

WordNet: trip the light fantastic

move in a pattern; usually to musical accompaniment; do or perform a dance

  Synonyms: dance, trip the light fantastic toe

Trip the light fantastic may refer to:

Trip the light fantastic (phrase), to dance nimbly or lightly

Trip the Light Fantastic (album), by British popstar Sophie Ellis-Bextor

Trip the Light Fantastic Tour, concert tour in support of the album

Tripping the Light Fantastic (album), from alternative rock band Lit

"Tripping the Light Fantastic" (song), by Brian Transeau, on his album Ima

http://www.answers.com/trip%20the%20ligh...

To dance nimbly or lightly, or to move in a pattern to musical accompaniment.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trip_the_l...

You’re probably that much ahead of some readers, so let me nod in the direction of all those who do know, while telling everyone else that to trip the light fantastic is an extravagant way of referring to dancing, a phrase rather more common years ago than it is now.

Just for once, it is possible to point the finger at the author of a saying. The phrase is from the mind and pen of John Milton and appeared in his lyric poem L’Allegro, published in 1645. The Italian title can be translated as “the cheerful man”, and the poem is directed to the goddess Mirth:

    Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee

    Jest, and youthful Jollity,

    Quips and cranks and wanton wiles,

    Nods and becks and wreathed smiles

    Such as hang on Hebe’s cheek,

    And love to live in dimple sleek;

    Sport that wrinkled Care derides,

    And Laughter holding both his sides.

    Come, and trip it, as you go,

    On the light fantastic toe;

    And in thy right hand lead with thee

    The mountain-nymph, sweet Liberty;

    And, if I give thee honour due,

    Mirth, admit me of thy crew,

    To live with her, and live with thee,

    In unreproved pleasures free ...

We’ve lost the sense now, because to trip here doesn’t mean to catch one’s foot and stumble or fall, but rather to move lightly and nimbly, to dance. This was what the word meant when it appeared in the language in the fourteenth century. And fantastic (or fantastick, as Milton originally spelled it) has here a sense of something marked by extravagant fancy, perhaps capricious or impulsive.

Milton’s lines were borrowed as an elevated or humorous way to refer to dancing, first as the phrase trip the light fantastic toe. William Makepeace Thackeray included it in one of his lesser-known works, Men’s Wives of 1843: “Mrs. Crump sat in a little bar, profusely ornamented with pictures of the dancers of all ages, from Hillisberg, Rose, Parisot, who plied the light fantastic toe in 1805, down to the Sylphides of our day”. Later it was used in a truncated form without the final word. Losing that — as well as the ancient meaning of the first word and the original sense of fantastic — makes the whole saying more than a little obscure to us moderns.

That it has survived so long, at least in the United States, is probably due to a song of 1894, words by Charles B Lawler, which appeared in a musical comedy called The Sidewalks of New York (a title that was presumably borrowed for that of the recent film starring Ed Burns, as well as two previous ones). The relevant bit goes:

    Boys and Girls together