the.com/cakewalk
the strut so good enslaved dancers won the dessert by mocking their masters' fancy moves
means Something extremely easy to accomplish, a task requiring almost no effort.
from From a literal walk for a cake: on plantations in the American South, enslaved Black people held strutting dances that elegantly parodied the stiff, formal manners of white slaveholders, and the best couple won a cake — giving rise to the phrase 'takes the cake.' The dance became a popular entertainment and competition by the late 19th century, and because the prancing looked smooth and effortless, 'cakewalk' came to mean any easy victory.
- origin
- plantation dance parodying white high-society manners
- the prize
- winners literally took home a cake
- reversed mockery
- masters watched, unaware they were the joke
- musical legacy
- sparked ragtime and influenced early jazz
- idiom shift
- now means absurdly easy, prize forgotten