It’s a piece of cake!

Following on from my last blog (‘not for all the tea in China’) I thought it’d be nice to follow to tea theme with a cake theme, so today’s expression is ‘a(chǎn) piece of cake’. We say something is ‘a(chǎn) piece of cake’ when it’s really easy to do, the idea of the expression is that doing the task is as easy and possibly as nice as eating a piece of cake (pretty easy if you ask me!). We might also use it sarcastically to say the opposite though:

A. How was your exam?

B. Oh yeah, a piece of cake.

It really depends on how you say it, and what your body language is.

I’ve done a bit of research into this expression, and apparently it relates to an American expression ‘a(chǎn) cakewalk’, which was a popular 19th century competition in which couples walked arm-in-arm and the most graceful won a cake. People started using the expression ‘it was a cakewalk’ so show that something was really easy, and this developed into the expression ‘a(chǎn) piece of cake’.

Other cakey expressions include ‘it takes the cake’, which we use when something is extraordinary or surprising, and ‘you can’t have your cake and eat it too’, which is a reminder that life is full of difficult choices and you often can’t have both options.

Hopefully the most difficult choice we will all have to make today is which sort of cake to eat!

(Source: www.englishonline.org.cn)

Johnny Grammar is English Online's resident grammar teacher. Johnny loves to tackle your worst grammar nightmares and provide you with simple explanations.

Johnny's blog: Johnny talks about interesting words and expressions in English that he comes across in his daily life.