Word of the day: easy
It’s always been easy in English to invent new euphemisms for “easy.” The practice goes way back, and finding even obsolete phrases is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. Shakespeare, in “Troilus and Cressida,” (1609), referred to “bedwork,” which meant something so easy it could be done while you were still in bed: “They call this bed-worke, mappry, Closet warre.”
Around the same era, another popular idiom for “easy” was “a sure card,” which probably referred to a card game in which you happened to have a card that you knew would win: “A cleare conscience is a sure card” comes from about 1580. Although “sure card” has disappeared, the “card” metaphor is still current, particularly in US politics. It shows up in “…they played the gender card” or “…he’s playing the race card…”.
Two more “easy” expressions from the 1600s are doing something “with a wet finger” and getting something “for the whistling.” The “wet finger” metaphor is probably based on the idea of moistening your finger to turn a page (which is generally regarded as not all that much work), and “for the whistling” has a modern equivalent in “I got that used car for a song. Yeah, the one with the big puddle of oil under it.”
There are other areas of English that expanded unusually fast in the 1800s, when a great many new words were coined. In addition, a great many words acquired connotations of ease around that time. Maybe the industrial revolution had people thinking that tasks that had once been difficult could become a “walk in the park,” “kid stuff,” or “a breeze” — those three inventions from the 19th century are still in use. Others have faded from use, either becoming more rare (“picnic,” “sitting target,” “waltz,” and “walkthrough”) or pretty much disappearing (at least in the US; some of these are still current in Commonwealth English): “playwork,” “snack,” “snip,” “pinch,” “pudding,” “soda,” and “doddle.” “It’s a cinch” comes from the 1800s too. That one comes from the strap that goes under a horse’s belly to hold a saddle on (evidently that operation is not difficult, although nobody asked the horse). But in the early 20th century “cinch” was expanded, for emphasis, to “lead pipe cinch.” As sometimes happens in English, the connotation of “lead pipe cinch” is immediately evident (it means not just easy, but super easy), but the literal meaning, if there even is one, isn’t clear at all. It seems to suggest that either putting a saddle on a length of pipe would be a piece of cake, or there’s something one might attach to a pipe using a cinch-like strap. Maybe it’s about strapping a pipe to a wall for support?
A lead pipe might, of course, be used as a weapon. In that case another word for it would be a “bludgeon.” Somebody using a bludgeon would be a “bludgeoner” — for example, the guy in the criminal gang who was the enforcer might be a bludgeoner. That guy is stereotypically big, strong, and not too bright. So it could be that he was only entrusted with very easy tasks, and sure enough, in the 1940s “bludge” was a slang term for an easy task. Interestingly, “bludge” was a slang term twenty years earlier in Australia and New Zealand, but it was used as a verb and meant to avoid hard work. In W.H. Downing’s “Digger Dial” (1919) “bludge on the flag” appeared, and meant a soldier avoiding responsibility. “Bludge” seems to still be used in Australia, or at least was as recently as 1969, when the “West Australian” newspaper included this: “Prime Minister Gorton..quoted..as saying..he was coming to..the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ conference ‘on a bit of a bludge’.”
There are plenty more euphemisms for easy. In fact you can probably think of some right now — it’s as easy as falling off a log.
