the.com/cake walk
A task so easy it insults the word 'effort.'
means Something so simple or effortless that it requires barely any real work to accomplish.
from From 19th-century African American communities, where the cakewalk was a strutting, high-stepping dance performed at social gatherings — often as a sly, competitive parody of the formal ballroom manners of white plantation society. The best dancers won an actual cake as a prize, hence 'taking the cake.' Because the dance looked so effortlessly breezy to onlookers (even though it took real skill), 'cakewalk' drifted into English by the late 1800s meaning anything easy — the performance's apparent ease outliving the dance itself.
- origin
- Black dance contest, prize was literally cake
- irony
- Mocked white judges by exaggerating their manners
- became
- Idiom for anything suspiciously easy