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Idiom: Piece of cake
Everybody loves cake!
A piece of cake is great any time of day or night!
Right now, I want a piece of Devil’s Food cake with vanilla ice cream on the side and a flat white coffee.
My mouth is beginning to water just thinking about it.
The idiom piece of cake has become somewhat of a cliché over the years due to overuse.
When we say something is a piece of cake, we mean it is easy to accomplish.
Like everything else, though, whether something is easy or hard depends on many factors.
Reading an English-language newspaper is easy for me, but it may be slightly challenging for you.
If I were to put on my English teacher’s hat, I could say that learning English is a piece of cake.
Now, I would intend to motivate you and other students like you.
However, you may disagree with me and think it must be a very old and stale piece of cake.
This cliché has a fascinating origin.
It comes from the southern United States in the 1870s.
At that time, it was common to award cakes as competition prizes.
One of these competitions was for slaves.
Slave couples would act like their white masters.
The slaves would mock their white overlords, and the couple that did the best imitation was awarded the cake.
This type of competition was also called a cakewalk.
‘Cakewalk’ is still a term that means something is very easy.
So, ‘cakewalk’ and ‘piece of cake‘ have the same origin and meaning.
I bet you never thought that such a harmless-sounding idiom would originate in such dreadful circumstances.
Before I carried out my research, I hadn’t known about it either.
On the bright side, learning English can also teach you about history, how the world has thankfully changed for the better, and how language evolved.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 74.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.