'Rock' meaning 'wear' or 'sport'

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 3:38 PM, William Salmon <william.salmon at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> >> Still, the evolution of the "wear with panache or pride" sense is
> >> intriguing. There's clearly a connection with OED sense 5c, "cause to
> >> move with musical rhythm" (with latent sexual connotations, all the
> >> way back to Trixie Smith's 1922 "My Man Rocks Me with One Steady
> >> Roll"). Objects for this sense can either be people or spaces with
> >> people in them (rock the joint/house/party/casbah). But early hiphop
> >> usage extended the verb to other objects, most notably "the
> >> mic(rophone)" (back to "Rapper's Delight" in 1979: "I'm gonna rock the
> >> mic 'til you can't resist"). "Rock the mic" = "rap admirably" is not
> >> yet reflected in the OED entry for "rock", but I see it as a vital
> >> link to the "wear proudly" sense, since it opened up the possibility
> >> for other rap accoutrements to be taken as objects of the verb --
> >> like, for instance, the Adidas sneakers of Run-DMC and their fans c.
> >> 1986.
> >>
> >> "My Adidas" came out in 1986, and here's a scene from a Run-DMC
> >> concert the following year:
> >>
> >> "Then, Run-DMC yelled out, 'Okay, everybody in the house, rock your
> >> Adidas.' On cue, three thousand pairs of Adidas shot in to the air.
> >> (Christopher Vaughn, "Simmons' Rush for Profits," Black Enterprise,
> >> December 1992, 67, quoted by Naomi Klein, _No Logo_, 2000)
> >>
> >> So there it seems to be more about displaying than wearing proudly.
>
> I think this description works for the following uses too, where the
> object is a person's own body, and the point seems to be at minimum to
> display it.
>
> I don?t know why Salma hasn?t been out rockin that body she?s got.
> It sucks for us since she?s got an amazing body to look at
>
> Britney Spears is rocking that new body and she is FINALLY divorcing
> Kevin Federline.
>
> We love that she's rocking her new body, but we're not really feeling
> the Beyonce armpit pose.

Yes, those do seem in line with the use of "rock" for displaying, say,
a new haircut. But I also detect influence from the older sense of
"cause to move musically/sexually" as in Justin Timberlake's 2003 hit
"Rock Your Body" (of "wardrobe malfunction" Super Bowl halftime fame).


--Ben Zimmer

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