trip a light fantastic meaning

The meaning and origin of the expression: Trip the light fantastic

Trip the light fantastic

What's the meaning of the phrase 'trip the light fantastic'.

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

What's the origin of the phrase 'Trip the light fantastic'?

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 derides, 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."

By Gary Martin

Gary Martin is a writer and researcher on the origins of phrases and the creator of the Phrase Finder website. Over the past 26 years more than 700 million of his pages have been downloaded by readers. He is one of the most popular and trusted sources of information on phrases and idioms.

The Origin—and Evolution—of the Phrase 'Trip the Light Fantastic'

By v.m. braganza | aug 10, 2022.

Today, thanks to the movie Mary Poppins Returns (2018), the phrase trip a little light fantastic might conjure images of dancing chimney sweeps . But this colloquialism has strayed quite a bit from its semantic origins. While it has always referred to nimble, fleet-footed dancing, the imagery associated with trip the light fantastic is a matter of profound disagreement.

English poet John Milton (1608-1674), best known for his Biblical epic Paradise Lost, popularized the idiom in 1645 when he included it in one of his minor poems, “ L’Allegro ” (“The Happy Man”). In the poem, Milton called upon Euphrosyne , one of a trio of minor classical goddesses known as the three Graces (and fittingly, the goddess of good cheer) to dance—or, as he puts it, to “Come and trip it, as ye go / On the light, fantastic toe.”

In this early instance, the idiom isn’t an idiom at all—it’s literal. “Tripping it on the toe” was a very visual, recurring Renaissance phrase for agile dancing. It appears even earlier than Milton’s poem, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610-11) when the spirit-servant Ariel promises to bring his fellow spirits to his master, Prospero, “Each one, tripping on his toe.” Milton supplies the words light and fantastic , both adjectives modifying toe and which emphasize the image of lithe, elaborate footwork. Milton’s rendering even caught the eye of Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels , who echoed it in one of his own poems in 1735: “See the Belle flutter with the sprightly Beau! / They trip it on the light, fantastic Toe!”

So far, so good … at least until Americans got involved. During this phase of the phrase’s life, the word toe tripped its way right out of Milton’s expression, giving us trip the light fantastic —a version of the idiom that is still familiar today.

It’s hard to determine the precise moment the transformation occurred, but some pinpoint the late-19th century song “The Sidewalks of New York”—whose lyrics included “Boys and Girls together / Me and Mamie O’Rourke / Tripped the light fantastic / On the sidewalks of New York”—as key in popularizing this version of the phrase . From there, it took off, showing up everywhere from a 1907 issue of  The United States Army and Navy Journal to writer Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing (which was adapted into a film for Netflix in 2021): In a room full of Black and white people dancing, Hugh Wentworth remarks to protagonist Irene, “Not having tripped the light with any of the males, I am unable to argue the point.” The phrase frequently crops up in literature, music, and film from the ’20s onward.

But trip the light fantastic was by no means done evolving. By the 1930s , some popular songs and literature had contorted the line even further out of shape with trip the light fandango . In 1967, the British progressive rock group Procul Harum included the phrase in their hit song “A Whiter Shade of Pale”—which American Songwriter says is about a “drunken sexual escapade gone awry”—with the lyrics, “We skipped the light fandango / Turned cartwheels ’cross the floor.”

Then, in 1973’s A Little Night Music , Stephen Sondheim twisted the phrase even more drastically into the lines “trip the light fandango” and “pitch the quick fantastic” in the happy-go-lucky number “The Miller’s Son.” (Sondheim, interestingly, was unaware that Milton coined a version of the phrase he’d used, and it’s unclear whether he knew of the Procul Harum song.) The fandango is a type of lively Spanish dance with roots in the early modern period, so to “skip” or “trip” a fandango simply means to dance the fandango.

Small wonder that linguist Noam Chomsky called trip the light fantastic a “ syntactically ill-formed idiom ”: Its syntax, or sentence structure, has changed again and again, until it’s unclear just what mental picture this phrase was intended to evoke—whether dancing the fandango or, more metaphorically, skipping across a beam of light. One thing is certain: Trip the light fantastic has tripped its way from early modern England to the present day as blithely and fantastically as a nimble dancer.

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Trip the light fantastic

Q From Lois Culver : To trip the light fantastic . I know what it means, but why the light fantastic part?

A 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, Me and Mamie O'Rourke, Tripped the light fantastic, On the sidewalks of New York.

Just to reinforce how mysterious the phrase now is to some people, one online site renders the relevant line as “We dance life’s fantastics”.

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Song Meanings and Facts

Greta Van Fleet

“trip the light fantastic” by greta van fleet.

by Amanda London · April 22, 2021

Concurrent with the release of Greta Van Fleet’s “Trip The Light Fantastic”, the full first names of the four members of Greta Van Fleet are as follows:

• Daniel (aka Danny)
• Jacob (Jake)
• Joshua (Josh)
• Samuel (Sam)

You may recognize all of those names as actually being sourced from the Old Testament. However, this is not a religious musical act. Or more specifically, they aren’t Christian nor apparently adhere to any type of belief system directly associated with the Bible. But yes, their personal beliefs do commonly come through in their lyrics. 

And all things considered, perhaps the easiest way to classify them in that regard is as being New Agers.

Or at least that is how we would usually define musicians in modern times who drop a song based on Hindu mysticism, as with this one. 

“Trip The Light Fantastic”

“Trip the light fantastic” is a phrase you’ve probably heard before. Traditionally it points to the idea of fancy, light-footed dancing. But Josh Kiszka and the boys aren’t utilizing it in such a manner. Rather the “light fantastic” would be more akin to achieving some type of elevated state – traveling the cosmos as a beam of light, so to speak. Or as the vocalist himself puts it, one “comet(ing) across the blistering hue”.

And  under Greta Van Fleet’s estimation , such a state can be achieved via the practice of what is referred to as the  Ah Sri Rmaa Jayam Ram  mantra. 

So such statements featured throughout, i.e. the repeating of the word “ram”, are actually based on the vocalist practicing the related chants. And by extension we can also say he is encouraging the listener to do so also.

So the Song is Religious?

But again, actually calling this song religious would be stretch. It’s more like philosophical than anything else. And it is based on that type of philosophy, which apparently goes by different names, which states that all of nature are related, or that we are actually “the land, the sea and the sky”. 

And the reason the vocalist is putting such forth is not in any type of environmental sense. Instead it is to illustrate that we actually have the ability to harness these powers for our own spiritual edification.

Or something like that. For at the end of the day, it’s almost like lyrics of this nature aren’t even really meant to be understood in detail anyway. After all, how do you logically explain a statement like “we’re tied to all things as one”?

But one thing we do know is this. The singer idealizes being up in the heavens as opposed to down here on earth. And the reason he apparently does is because down below, our world is dealing with a number of disheartening issues. 

So he perceives the practice of this belief system and mantra as a way of presumably sending his spirit up there. Perhaps, considering that this is in fact new ageism, he is alluding to transcendental meditation or astral projection. And at the same time, he is also passing on this discovery to the listener.

Facts about “Trip The Light Fantastic”

As is convention all four of the members of Greta Van Fleet are credited as writers of the track at hand. And they are:

• Danny Wagner
• Jake Kiszka
• Josh Kiszka

Meanwhile the producer of the song is Greg Kurstin, who at the time is one of the top and most widely-utilized musicians in the industry.

This song is from Greta Van Fleet’s full-length second album. The band titled the album “The Battle at Garden’s Gate”. And this project is the product of two labels, Republic Records and a lesser-known entity, Lava Records.

Greta Van Fleet has been around for some time, since 2012. However, it appears they didn’t really get put on until they were signed by the aforementioned Lava Record in 2017. So 2018 is when their first full album, “Anthem of the Peaceful Army”, came out.

And the track we’re dealing with today, again being released as part of their second full-length, was dropped on 16 April 2021. So even if active for nearly a decade, at this point the band are relatively newbies.

However they have still managed to earn a name for themselves. For instance they were nominated for four Grammy Awards in 2019, winning in the Best Rock Album category with their 2017 project “From the Fires” (which was technically an EP). 

Also the aforementioned “Anthem of the Peaceful Army” did its job in terms of helping to put Greta Van Fleet on the map, as it ascended all the way to number 3 on the Billboard 200. 

And even prior to that their debut single, “ Highway Tune “, topped Billboard’s  Mainstream Rock  list. In fact all four of their first singles – “Highway Tune” (2017), “Safari Song” (2017), “When the Curtain Falls” (2018) and “You’re the One” (2018) – managed to accomplish that feat.

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9 Responses

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Perhaps being spiritual is more than words or feelings. It is what we aspire to be rather than who we really are. We all fall short and need inspiration from music like they write. God Bless you Josh, Jake, Sam and Danny. You are all great!

I feel a lot of their songs are spiritual. I connect to them in a spiritual way. The lyrics are brilliant… the musical instruments are brilliant.

I found out about Greta Van Fleet late. But after discovering them I have been nothing but entranced. When I read the lyrics to trip the light fantastic I knew exactly what it was. Referencing Ram repeatedly when in India/Hindu it means God. The title itself refers to a poem done in 1637 by John Milton. that’s deep. 😁♥️

The best rock ‘n’ roll I’ve heard in so long. I simply can’t get enough of them. Made me so happy to finally hear some fantastic rock. The mystical part only makes it better.

I believe the song is in reference to the Hindu religion’s concept of Moksha (the goal of rebirth into the creator as opposed to returning back to earth via reincarnation.) Sri Ram Jaya is translated to ‘Victory for Lord Rama” who is a divination of the God Vishnu who is the protector of everything. As a Hindu, we believe that Moksha is the goal of this life, past lives, and future lives.

awesome band . sound so much like led zepplin . outstanding .

fantastic band .

I like their music. That being said, I don’t go to musicians for their brilliance in philosophy.

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