I’ve been saying things like “that’s how I roll” for quite a while now, and it occurred to me to wonder about the history of the phrase. As it happens, there’s a 2013 Stack Exchange post about it; most of the suggested answers are guesswork and contradictory, but there’s one that cites the OED:
The OED says it’s US slang originally in the language of rap and hip-hop. It’s sense VII.36.f. (and sense VII.36.e. is “Let’s roll”), under sense VII:
To move or convey on wheels or rollers, and related senses.
This is their first quotation of the phrase:
1991 ‘Hammer’ & F. Pilate (song title), This is the way we roll.
So I checked the OED, which does indeed have it as sense VII.36.f.:
intransitive. U.S. slang (originally in the language of rap and hip-hop). To act, behave (in a certain way). Frequently in that’s how (also the way) I (we, etc.) roll.
But it’s not clear to me that they’re deriving it directly from the sense “To move or convey on wheels or rollers,” and when I checked Green’s I found 4 (f) “in fig. use, to exist, to conduct one’s life”:
1972 [US] R. Kahn Boys of Summer 297: My younger brother Roy [. . .] had good ability, but he was too hardheaded. He had to roll separate.
2007 [US] UGK ‘Int’l Player’s Anthem’ 🎵 Baby you been rollin’ solo, time to get down with the team.
2016 [US] T. Robinson Rough Trade [ebook] ‘We don’t know how Byron rolls’.
2021 [US] J. Ellroy Widespread Panic 237: ‘No heavy petting, Janey. I don’t roll in that direction’.
But there’s also 6 (b) “(US black) to survive, to live, to conduct oneself” (first cite 1988 [US] Ice-T ‘Heartbeat’ 🎵 Just rollin’ thick as hell, champagne I sip as well); why is that a different sense? And how far back does it date? One of the Stack Exchange commenters says:
I was born in 1968, and my family and community in San Diego regularly used the term “cause that’s just how we roll” and variations. My father, Black and Chippewa, and spoke Spanish, was born in 1916 and was raised in Los Angeles. He was originally from Texas. But the phrase has been around a long long time. I believe it’s from Black slang.
Which makes sense to me; I’m pretty sure it predates hiphop. Anyway, what do y’all think?
I was certainly surprised at the idea that it only appeared with hip-hop. If this is actually true, I’m suffering from whatever the opposite of the Recency Ilusion is.
I expect it to be at least as old as “rock and”.
But “that’s how I roll” doesn’t have to make more sense than “that’s the way the cookie crumbles”…
i agree with DM – and i’d extend it past the fixed phrase “rock and roll” to the pairing of the two in their sexual-euphemism sense, which goes back to at least the 1920s (trixie smith, recorded in 1922: “my daddy rocks me / with one steady roll”).
i think that dual extended sense of “roll” runs basically parallel to the similarly combined sexual/mode-of-living sense of “do” (e.g. dean johnson “just because i let you do me / doesn’t mean you know how to dance”; montell jordan “this is how we do it / south central does it like nobody does”).
in a more absolute sense, my handwavy guess would be that it’s from late-19thC african american english, migrating into white usage starting in the late 1910s – with a possibility of earlier use in multiracial nautical contexts.
There’s the phrase made famous by one of the Flight 93 heroes of 9/11, which I think is probably related to “how we roll” in some way, but has a more immediate connotation: “Let’s roll”
It’s not “let’s live our lives” but more like let’s move into action / let’s do this thing.
In theory, I might expect that Let’s roll out (i.e., get this actual convoy of trucks moving) evolved into Let’s roll (ie, just get whatever project or task underway ) and finally into How we roll (the “project” is abstracted so far as to take in one’s whole way of living.) But I don’t know that there’s any history behind Let’s roll prior to 9/11.
(Acknowledging I didn’t initially notice that let’s roll was already cited in a parenthesis in the original post, but I’m leaving this up because I think it provides a plausible path from other meanings of roll.)
“Let’s roll,” for, “Let’s get moving and to work,” is decades old. I’ve known it all my life, and it didn’t feel like a new, slangy usage when I was a kid.
The ngram for how we roll is extraordinary – it basically occurred in print for a few years in the 1850s and never again till this millennium.
For some reason, the ngram viewer has a problem with lets roll out, with or without apostrophe. The issue doesn’t seem to be three words, since how we roll worked, nor lets/let’s since lets roll worked.