"As easy as pie" is a popular
colloquial
Colloquialism (), also called colloquial language, everyday language or general parlance, is the linguistic style used for casual (informal) communication. It is the most common functional style of speech, the idiom normally employed in conver ...
idiom
An idiom is a phrase or expression that typically presents a figurative, non-literal meaning attached to the phrase; but some phrases become figurative idioms while retaining the literal meaning of the phrase. Categorized as formulaic language, ...
and
simile
A simile () is a figure of speech that directly ''compares'' two things. Similes differ from other metaphors by highlighting the similarities between two things using comparison words such as "like", "as", "so", or "than", while other metaphors cr ...
which is used to describe a task or experience as pleasurable and simple.
The phrase is often interchanged with
piece of cake, which shares the same connotation.
Origin
The phrase was used in 1910 by
Zane Grey
Pearl Zane Grey (January 31, 1872 – October 23, 1939) was an American author and dentist. He is known for his popular adventure novels and stories associated with the Western genre in literature and the arts; he idealized the American frontie ...
in "
The Young Forester" and in the ''
Saturday Evening Post
''The Saturday Evening Post'' is an American magazine, currently published six times a year. It was issued weekly under this title from 1897 until 1963, then every two weeks until 1969. From the 1920s to the 1960s, it was one of the most widely c ...
'' of 22 February 1913. It may have been a development of the phrase ''like eating pie'', first recorded in ''Sporting Life'' in 1886. In 1855, the phrase, in a slight variation was published in a book called ''Which? Right or Left?'' Here it was used as ''nice as a pie''.
Alternatively, in pre-reformation England the collection of liturgical rules for all 35 various days when Easter could fall was called Pie. ''Easy as pie'' could be ironically referring to overly complicated rubrics.
[''The Oxford English Dictionary'', 193.3]
There are some claims that its use in New Zealand in the 1920s was influenced by the similar expressions ''pie at'' or ''pie on'' from the
Maori term ''pai'' 'good'.
References
Further reading
* {{cite book, last=Flexner, first=Stuart Berg, title=I hear America talking: an illustrated history of American words and phrases, url=https://archive.org/details/ihearamericatalk0000flex_b4d4, url-access=registration, accessdate=29 November 2010, date=1979-10-01, publisher=Simon and Schuster, isbn=978-0-671-24994-6, pag
69}
External links
"piece of cake" in Wiktionary
English-language idioms
English phrases