Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - Cheah baby we're gonna trip the light fantastic!

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Well now..I figured this post perfect for here lol. I watched Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy last weekend..if you haven't seen it, I may spoil one tiny scene for you...this is NOT about the movie though!(not really) ;) It's about something I heard Sam Rockwell say in the movie...

Towards the end of the movie when they're fixin to go traveling Sam Rockwell tells that one woman "Cheah baby...we're gonna trip the light fantastic!"

I'd heard the phrase before I just didn't know where. I immediately started cracking up big time and slapping my knew and all that. The company I was with had no idea why I was laughing and I think I may have been the only guy who laughed at that.

They were like "Fern whats so funny?"(My nickname..don't ask) and I was like "What you've never heard trip the light fantastic before?" They were clueless. I couldn't explain to them what it means because I myself didn't know I'd just heard it.

So after that everyone I saw that I knew I asked them if they'd heard it and they just gave me the look like "What?" and then my bro n law and friends would tell me I'm crazy. Finally I called my parents...and it was conformed that it's actually a real saying. I figured it had something to do with dancing..my father had a different definition for it. Turns out I was right.

So lets see

Verb 1. trip the light fantastic - move in a pattern; usually to musical accompaniment; do or perform a dance; "My husband and I like to dance at home to the radio"

Okay now it's origins...

Quote:

[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”.

Ya know you just gotta love the internet...so many possibilities I tell ya. Good times good good times....I wish I could be in your heart!....TO BE ONE! With you loooooooove...Maybe I'll be there to shake your hand! Yeah! When we all live together and be a SIMPLEEEEEE!!! Kind of maaaaaan! Be something in the way she moves...effects me like no other oh yeah baby man I'm out

Asta!! :thumbsup: