Forget Shakespeare.  Cake is the pinnacle of human culture.

Dear Word Detective:  Probably everyone knows what “a piece of cake” means.  As a figure for something that is not only done easily, but is also enjoyable, it is a pretty  straightforward metaphor.  My question is about its origin.  The first I recall hearing it was in the song “A Spoonful of Sugar” from the musical “Mary Poppins.”  When you find the fun in a  particular job, so the song says, “then every task you undertake becomes a piece of cake.”  Is this the origin of the phrase, or was it in use previously?  (Apologies for setting your head  humming.) — Charles Anderson.

No problem.  That song can’t get stuck in my head because I’ve never heard the song.  That’s right, I’ve never seen “Mary Poppins.”  I’ve also never seen “The Sound of Music.”  Appalling, I know, but it gets worse.  I’ve also never seen”Titanic,” “Shrek” (any of them, or any big-screen cartoon, for that matter), or any of the “Lord of the Rings” movies.  You name it, I haven’t seen it.  Come Saturday night, you’ll find us poring over the newspaper, deciding what movie not to see.

But while I’m not exactly an avid movie-goer, I do love cake, and, judging by the number of cake metaphors, proverbs and aphorisms out there, the English language agrees with me.  We speak of something easily accomplished as a “cakewalk,” we say that something extraordinary “takes the cake,” and we even caution that “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” as a way of saying that life demands choices.  And yes, I know that “purists” insist that “you can’t eat your cake and have it too” is the supposedly “proper” form.  But I’d like to point out that the last person to make a stink about that (Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber) is spending his life in a very small room.  (See the Wikipedia entry on the phrase for the story.)

To say that something is “a piece of cake,” of course, is to say that it is very easy or pleasant, or, often, pleasantly easy.  If, for example, I brace myself going in the door of the Department of Motor Vehicles to renew my license, but find that there are only three people in line, I would almost certainly declare “Piece of cake!” (after recovering from fainting).  Of course,  just how “cakey” a task is depends on whether one is the “doer” or “sender.”  I learned early on in my work career that any boss who described an assignment as “a piece of cake” was almost certainly lying.

“Piece of cake” had been around for a while before Mary Poppins sang that song.  The phrase first appeared in print in the 1930s, and its exact origin is uncertain.  One theory traces it to the “cakewalk,” a contest popular in the African-American community in the 19th century, in which couples competed strolling arm in arm, with the prize, a cake, being awarded to the most graceful and stylish team (giving us the phrase “to take the cake”).  Although the “cakewalk”  demanded skill and grace, the term came to be used as boxing slang for an easily-won fight, and then for any “sure thing.”  It is very possible that “piece of cake” followed a similar route from the sophisticated art of “cakewalking” to meaning “the easiest thing imaginable.”

Baa-baa-boom!

Dear Word Detective: First of all, is it “lambast” or “lambaste”? The question is prompted by the local sports page which used the word to describe how the local college team defeated a visiting team. I tried to find its origin by going to online dictionaries but without success: they just define it. Also, what is it with sportswriters? They either use cliches or try to use relatively little-used words: some of these they understand and others they use seemingly because they sound good. One, for example, used “penultimate” apparently to mean “the ultimate” because, I guess, that’s what it sounded like to him. I imagine he never took Latin. — MMU.

Well, to tackle (yuk yuk) your second question first, I actually find myself feeling a lot of sympathy for sportswriters. A general assignment reporter or columnist encounters and reports on a wide variety of events, furnishing them wide leeway in their quest for the perfect word. Columnists even get away with metaphors. But a sportswriter is essentially watching the same events day after day, year after year, and writing about them with a necessarily limited vocabulary drawn largely from the lingo of bar fights (“thrashed,” “vanquished,” “rolled over,” “overcame,” etc.). There’s not a lot of room for literary or classical allusions (except the chestnut about “a phoenix rising from the ashes”), so it’s hard to blame them when they venture into their personal unknown with a word like “penultimate.” I don’t know why that fellow assumed that the “pen” means “absolutely” or whatever, but it comes from the Latin “paene,” meaning “almost” (making “penultimate” equivalent to “next to last”).

“Lambaste” is a fine old word, meaning literally “to assault violently, to beat severely,” and figuratively “to criticize or scold sharply.” It’s also spelled “lambast,” and although the preferred pronunciation at the moment seems to be “lam-BASTE” (as if you were basting a lamb roast), “lam-BAST” is OK too. “Lambaste” first appeared in English in the mid-17th century in the literal “beat up” sense; the “scold” sense didn’t develop until the late 19th century.

The “baste” in “lambaste” is a bit of a mystery. It is definitely the same as the obsolete English verb “to baste,” meaning “to beat,” which appeared around 1533 and may be related to various Scandinavian root words meaning “to whip or flog.” Opinions vary as to whether this “baste” is related in any way to our common “baste” meaning “to moisten roasting food to prevent burning.”

The “lam” in “lambaste” is actually a bit redundant, in that it is also an old English word meaning “to beat,” from an Old Norse root meaning “to make lame.” Interestingly, this is the same “lam” we use in “on the lam,” meaning to be “on the run” from authorities. In that usage, the original sense was apparently that the escapee’s feet were literally beating the road in haste, making “to lam” equivalent to “to beat it.”