where does the word "cakewalk" come from?
536517
I'm not sure if it lends itself directly to the context you are using it for but there used to be a sort of country fair game called a cake walk.  People pay a certain amount to enter and are each given a cake or sweet on a plate.  Then they walk around a circular path to music and when the music ends the person who is standing inside a circle on the ground wins the cake they are carrying.  It's a pretty easy way of getting a cake so maybe that's why something easy is called "cakewalk"?
1065020
Its spelt 'klick' and it is a common military term meaning kilometre (or sometimes kilometres per hour). Its use became popular among soldiers in Vietnam during the 1960s, although veterans of the war recall its usage as early as the 1950s. Its origin is sometimes linked with the Australian Army in Korea.
120738
I believe it originated around gangsters of the 20s who wanted a word to act tough with when asking for money such as "Gimme yer dough!!" or "Frankie, don't forget the dough or Patty will be mad" It was just the slang of the time, but sort of lingered till present day
61106
the proper name is a " cake ". it's a deodorant or a sanitizer like the thing you hang on your toilet bowl
583409
I've heard from Mexicans in Mexico that the term gringo came from the military of the US. The battle cry "Green Go".I can't attest to the accuracy of this explanation. We are all known as "Bolillos" which is a white bread roll in Mexico.Gabachos,guedo pronounced"wedo" these terms refers to the light skin.It is very common to call people nicknames referring to their skin color hair,shortness,tallness etc.These usually aren't meant as insults or racial slurs.
121458
The American term skid row or skid road is used to refer to the rundown area of a city where alcoholics and vagrants congregate. There is a formally identified Skid Row in Seattle and Los Angeles as well as informally identified districts in almost every major American city, such as The Bowery in New York City. The term was memorialized in the song Skid Row from the musical Little Shop of Horrors.\n\nThe first skid row was Skid Road (Yesler Way) in Seattle, where logs were skidded into the water on a corduroy road for delivery to Henry Yesler's lumber mills. After the onset of the Great Depression, the area went into decline, and skid row became synonymous with being a bad neighborhood.
1170816
This originated in the early 1980s. It is generally regarded as an American expression. This item from the New York newspaper the Syracuse Herald-American, Feb. 1982, which is the earliest version in print that I can find, puts that in some doubt. It's in a piece by Jerry Buck, writing out of Los Angeles, about actress Lauren Tewes
695020
It comes from the original adventure game, Colassal (sp?) Cave, played on mainframes which later was stolen or plagerized by Scott Adams and published as "Adventure." This part is a maze and as you move through the maze, the phrase changes, twisty maze of little passages, maze of twisty little passages, and so forth. There was a pattern to how the phrase wording changed, which is how you got out. This game was played in text, no gtraphics, with word descriptions and a command prompt where you typed in simple one or two word commands. The idea was to explore and find treasure and get back out again. This is also where two famous magic words come from, PLUGH and XYZZY. These 2 words when spoken in the right place acted like a teleporter to the other place the word could be used.  I think I still have a copy of the original program written in BASIC around here somewhere.\n\nEdit: Found it, the link where you will find out the whole story . They even have copies of the game for various platforms so you can play the game yourself.
986677
A century ago etymologists speculated that "story" came from some lost word "stairy," perhaps related to Gaelic staidhir, flight of stairs; or possibly from something along the lines of "stagery," derived from "stage." Others dismissed these as being obviously born of desperation, and for a time the experts settled on Old French estoree, a thing built. But doubts arose when researchers dug up such phrases as una historia octo fenestrarum, "a story of eight windows," from medieval Latin history books. Historia in Roman times meant history or story, and by the Middle Ages had acquired the meaning of "picture." So the charming notion arose that medieval folk were in the habit of installing rows of windows in their buildings called "stories" that were decorated with paintings or sculpture. The theory is that these stories, which for all anybody knows may actually have told a story, eventually came to signify a level of a building. Apparently as evidence of this practice, the authors of the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins cite the fact that they once visited a Swiss-style hotel decorated along these lines in Lake Placid, New York. (Each floor was tricked out with a large hand-lettered slogan, such as "The only way to multiply happiness is to divide it.") At any rate, conjecture has now hardened into conviction. Believe at your own risk.
534929
This expression, meaning "be very careful to behave correctly",\nhas been in use from the 17th century on.  Theories include:  an\nadmonishment to children learning to write; an admonishment to\ntypesetters (who had to look at the letters reversed); an\nadmonishment to seamen not to soil their navy pea-jackets with\ntheir tarred "queues" (pigtails); "mind your pints and quarts";\n"mind your prices and quality"; "mind your pieds and queues"\n(either feet and pigtails, or two dancing figures that had to be\naccurately performed); the substitution of /p/ for "qu" /kw/ in the\nspeech of uneducated ancient Romans; or the confusion by students\nlearning both Latin and Ancient Greek of such cognates as _pente_\nand _quintus_.  And yes, we've heard the joke about the instruction\nto new sextons:  "Mind your keys and pews."
335864
Some of the words given by bmwdriver above aren't right. \n\nA foot path isn't a sidewalk; the right word is pavement.  Foot path is just a right of way for pedestrians only, i.e. no horses or vehicles.\n\nJersey is a particular type of sweater; the generic term is "jumper".\n\nPiss is most definitely not beer (though if you've been told this, it is probably a British person's opinion of American beer).  We use "beer" as well.  Piss is urine, though "pissed" is drunk, not angry and "On the piss" is going out for a session of heavy drinking.  "Taking the piss" is making a fool of someone or having them on.\n\nShag isn't sex itself, it's a verb meaning to have sex.\n\nThe usual ones that cause amusement are:\n\nBritish pants = US underwear (though we say that as well)\nBritish trousers = US pants\nBritish fanny = US <censored by Yahoo>, but put it this way, British fannies are female only and round the front, not the back.\n\nFor far more answers to this question than will fit here, see the link below, which has a searchable US/UK equivalents dictionary.\n\nOh, and to answer the second half of the question:\n\nBugger is gay penetrative sex (verb) or someone who practises it (noun) and derives from "Bulgarians", who were (falsely) accused of such practices in the middle ages.   It's strength as an expletive has declined over the years and so it would not be unusual to hear "Bugger me!" as an exclamation of surprise (and not an invitation) or to hear someone described as "He's a rum bugger", without any implication of sexual orientation.  You won't hear it in polite company though.\n\nBloody is a fits-anywhere mild expletive.  It derives from the original expression "By Our Lady" (i.e. swearing by the virgin Mary), but I don't think a lot of people are really aware of that today.  It can be inserted more or less anywhere in a sentence that f***ing might be, but isn't anywhere near as unacceptable.  Again, not really for use in polite society though.
292502
The first I heard the term was in an old Meatloaf song where he mentioned having sex by the dashboard lights. I don't understand the context that you use it in unless he is refering to it like the lights on your dash that tell you something is wrong with your car.
215700
Tradition.\n\nThe wedding cake as we know it today, with its successively smaller layers, its supporting glass or plastic pillars, fancy hand piped frosting, all came about in 1859, with a confection that commemorated the marriage of one of Queen Victoria's daughters. As is the case with today’s brides, the celebrities of the time moved the public to emulate their fashions, starting with the wealthiest Victorian families first.\n\nFor a white icing, only the most expensive, pure refined sugars could be used; so the whiter the cake, the wealthier the bride’s family must be (as most sugar at the time was browner than today’s refined type). A pure white wedding cake also complemented the bride as the focal point of the wedding, since she too was wearing white as her own symbol of purity.
336110
I think it comes from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
998592
It comes from the early 1800s in London.  The term "pig" for a contemptable person was around a long time before that.  Particularly, the name refers to a certain group of Police called the Bow Street Runners that criminals referred to as China Street Pigs.
815434
The original and only sensible version of this saying is “You can’t eat your cake and have it too,” meaning that if you eat your cake you won’t have it any more. People get confused because we use the expression “have some cake” to mean “eat some cake,” and they therefore misunderstand what “have” means in this expression. \nso what it means is if you eat your cake its gone so tough!\nand for the previous "answerer" marie antoinette said "let them eat cake" when told the peasants had no bread so stop talking bullshit my man
845776
It looks like an acronym, but it isn't. It is originally from a science fiction story called "R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)" by Karel Čapek. The word is probably based on "... the verb robotovat, meaning "to work" or "to slave", and the noun robota (meaning corvée) used in the Czech and Slovak languages" (see the wikipedia entry below)\n\nThe generally accepted modern definition is "...any machine which mimics the actions of a human (biomimicry), in the physical sense or in the mental sense."\n\nCheck out the wikipedia entry, below.