Sunday, January 8, 2012

What's the meaning of "rock and roll"?

I'm learning English.





"Come on! Let's rock and roll."





What's the meaning of "rock and roll" in the sentence?|||It can mean to dance, to have sex, or just to get moving, get into action.





Wikipedia says





The term "rock and roll", as secular black slang for dancing or sex, appeared on record for the first time in 1922 on Trixie Smith's "My Man Rocks Me With One Steady Roll". Even earlier, in 1916, the term "rocking and rolling" was used with a religious connotation, on the phonograph record "The Camp Meeting Jubilee" by an unnamed male quartette.





The word "rock" had a long history in the English language as a metaphor for "to shake up, to disturb or to incite". Rocking was a term used by black gospel singers in the American South to mean something akin to spiritual rapture. By the 1940s, however, the term was used as a double entendre, ostensibly referring to dancing, but with the subtextual meaning of sex, as in Roy Brown's "Good Rocking Tonight." The verb "roll" was a medieval metaphor which meant "having sex". Writers for hundreds of years have used the phrases "They had a roll in the hay" or "I rolled her in the clover". The terms were often used together ("rocking and rolling") to describe the motion of a ship at sea, for example as used in 1934 by the Boswell Sisters in their song "Rock and Roll" . Country singer Tommy Scott was referring to the motion of a railroad train in the 1951 "Rockin and Rollin'"..|||The term 'rock and roll' was introduced to US audiences in the lyrics of many rhythm and blues records, starting around 1947.


Three different songs with the title "Rock And Roll" were recorded in the late-1940's; one by Paul Bascomb in 1947, another by Wild Bill Moore in 1948, and yet another by Doles Dickens in 1949, and the phrase was in constant use in the lyrics of R%26amp;B songs of the time period.

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