To "trip the light fantastic" is to dance nimbly or lightly to music. The origin of the phrase is attributed to John Milton. History This phrase evolved over time. Its origin is attributed to Milton's 1645 poem L'Allegro, which includes lines addressed to Euphrosyne—one of the Three Graces of Greek mythology: Come, and trip it as ye go, On the light fantastick toe. In Milton's use the word "trip" is to "dance nimbly" and "fantastic" suggests "extremely fancy". "Light fantastic" refers to the word toe, and "toe" refers to a dancer's "footwork". "Toe" has since disappeared from the idiom, which then becomes: "trip the light fantastic". A few years before, in 1637, Milton had used the expression "light fantastic" in reference to dancing in his masque Comus: "Come, knit hands, and beat the ground,/In a light fantastic round." Prior to Milton, the expression "tripping on his toe" appears in Shakespeare's The Tempest (1610–1611): 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 phrase "He did trip it / On the toe" appears in the Jacobean song "Since Robin Hood", set to music by Thomas Weelkes in 1608. This expression was popularised in the American song "Sidewalks of New York" (melody and lyrics by Charles B. Lawlor and James W. Blake) in 1894. Part of the chorus: Boys and girls together, me and Mamie O'Rourke Tripped the light fantastic On the sidewalks of New York. The phrase occurs in Nella Larsen's 1929 novel, Passing, when the character Hugh Wentworth, while watching black and white men and women dancing together, chats with Irene and says, "Not having tripped the light fantastic with any males, I'm not in a position to argue the point." Milton, Blake and Michelangelo John Milton's poem L'Allegro (1631) encourages the goddess Mirth/Euphrosyne to "trip it as ye go/On the light fantastick toe", and that poem inspired William Blake to create a watercolor, "Mirth" (1820), which illustrates that moment in Milton's poem. It is thought that Milton's poem may have been inspired by Michelangelo's sculpture of Giuliano de' Medici, which represents vita activa (active life). Syntactical critique In a discussion of anomalous idiomacies in a paradigm attributed to Noam Chomsky in his book Syntactic Structures, it is suggested that some idioms are not "syntactically well-formed", and which "could not not