get rolling

To begin something. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our offices. Let's get the meeting rolling, shall we? You have to leave? But we just got the party rolling!

To leave or depart. Let's get rolling. We need to be at the airport by 7:30. There's nothing happening here—let's get rolling.

Fig. to get started. Come on. It's time to leave. Let's get rolling! Bill, it's 6:30. Time to get up and get rolling!

Begin, get busy, hurry up. The first of these colloquialisms originated in Great Britain in the 1930s and appears to have crossed the Atlantic during World War II. It uses crack in the sense of “move fast,” a usage dating from the late nineteenth century, and is often put as an imperative, as in “Now get cracking before it starts to rain.” The synonymous get rolling, dating from the first half of the 1900s, alludes to setting wheels in motion. It, too, may be used as an imperative, but is more often heard in such locutions as “Jake said it’s time to get rolling on the contracts.”