Hi everyone,
I'm new here to the forum – I love the A Way with Words podcast and have always been fascinated by languages and words. I hold a bachelor's degree in linguistics and am working on my M.A. in applied linguistics.
Usually I can find out just about everything I need to know about words and phrases I'm unfamiliar with by using A) "the Google" (as Bush 43 famously called it), B) looking them up in the OED, or C) if they're more slangy, looking them up on Urban Dictionary. However, I tried these things the other day with a term I adore, "cake class", and ran across some trouble! FYI, I'm not referring to a cake baking or decorating class, which is what Google seemed to think I was looking for. (The only way I could get it to give me the results I was looking for was to search a specific site that I knew would use the term a LOT, like searching ratemyprofessors.com specifically or something like that). The term wasn't in Urban Dictionary, so I added it myself, and the definition was rejected! I was crushed! =p Here's what I submitted:
definition:
A course, typically a college class, that covers very easy subject matter or has a light workload.
example:
Biggest cake class ever. All you do is write journals and watch movies.
So I guess my questions would be where does this term come from, and who uses it? Would it just be a shortening of "piece of cake class"? Is it a regional thing? I'm sure it's slightly generational because people my parents' age had different words for a course like this. I've polled my friends of all ages and various levels of college/non-college, and I can't quite pin it down.
Thanks for reading!
When I moved to western Pennsylvania between 7th and 8th grade—let's see, that would be the summer of 1968—I discovered to my surprise that "cake" meant "sissy". Actually it may have meant vaguely homosexual, but the term was applied pretty broadly so it was hard to be sure. White socks were "cake socks", and "cake" was used as an adjective to mean "sissy" or possibly "effeminate".
I never encountered that term in the Midwest, and when I left the Pittsburgh area in 1972 I never encountered it in NC either—nor anywhere else, ever. So it has to be connected with your usage. But your "piece-of-cake class" is also a likely sounding explanation; I wonder whether it's possible that the one came from the other? Could be that a "cakewalk" turned into a broader meaning in someone's mind, and it went from there.
Sounds like simply piece of cake + class to me.
Funny. Until I got to your definition, I thought you were heading toward the social class that would say, "Let them eat cake!"
I have never heard the phrase "cake class," but we would productively use cake as a predicate adjective for something that was easy, and it was most certainly thought within my circle as being a short form of "a piece of cake." I am talking about the 70s here, when I was in secondary school and college.
So we would say:
That test was cake.
I thought the take-home was going to be hard, but it was cake.
Don't worry about taking the train to New York City. It's cake.
By the way, the term we used attributively at that time for an easy course was gut. I have no idea why or where that came from. So Physics for Poets and Rocks for Jocks (Geology 101) were "gut courses."