Trip the Light Fantastic / Trip the Light Fantastic Toe
To dance. To move gracefully to the accompaniment of music.
Examples:
That was me tripping the light fantastic with Traci Johnson at the Spring Fling Dance Thing!
Let's go out tonight and trip the light fantastic.
Origin:
The phrase has evolved through a series of different uses in the English language.
In its original form it appears in the poem L'Allegro by John Milton:
Com, and trip it as ye go,
On the light fantastick toe.
Later it was used by W. Shakespeare in 'The Tempest' in another form:
Before you can say come, and goe,
And breathe twice; and cry, so, so
Each one tripping on his Toe,
Will be here with mop, and mowe.
The expression gained popularity in the English language from the song Sidewalks of New York (1894):
Boys and girls together, me and Mamie O'Rourke
Tripped the light fantastic
On the sidewalks of New York.
In 1967 it was used as a contemporary reinterpretation of John Milton – in the song A Whiter Shade of Pale, performed by Procol Harum and with lyrics written by Keith Reid:
Skip the light fandango.
Definitions from the English-Bulgarian Dictionary:
Trip [trip]
- To step / To dance quickly and lightly, to skip.
- To stumble, to trip (up).
- To catch out / To catch in a lie / contradiction, etc.
- arch. To travel, to wander.
- To unbind, to unfasten, to unhook, to release, naut. to detach (anchor) from the bottom.
- tech. To disconnect, to switch off.
- colloq. To hallucinate under the influence of drugs.
Light [lait]
- Light.
Fantastic [fæn'tæstik]
- Wonderful, strange, bizarre, grotesque.
- Fantastic, unreal, amazing, fabulous.
- Capricious.
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