I'm not a musician but...
This is Wikipedia describing what it is that makes music fit my personal definition of swing: "In music, a swung note or shuffle note is a performance practice, mainly in jazz-influenced music, in which some notes with equal written time values are performed with unequal durations, usually as alternating long and short." (from here)
My LH teacher said that the triple step is best done to a swung note - the slow step done to a slightly longer beat and the two quick steps done (both) to a quicker beat.
But this is my definition of swing music. Swing dance is something entirely different. As far as I understand it (and I may well be entirely wrong), swing dance is a branch on the genealogy tree of dance, starting with the Charleston and, in some forms, with a bit of interbreeding from the Foxtrot. It has evolved into LH, balboa, WCS, ECS, rock & roll...and of course it's one of the parents of MJ as well. I guess this is where the widest definition of swing music comes from - music you can do any of these dances to.
(Although, as an aside, I only sometimes consider MJ to be a swing dance. It depends on the music and the leader...if you play me some jazz on the MJ floor then I'll dance a swing dance, but if you play me something smoother then I'll dance something else entirely...)
(Except that I always do this Charleston-y kick at the beginning of some moves, which is very annoying when I'm trying to dance smoothly, but I can't stop it from happening )
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