Robert B.Parkerの "Painted Ladies"を読んでいます。
When she was gone I took a small gym bag of tools and went to her front door. She hadn't locked it with a key when she came out, so if it was locked, it would be a spring bolt and not a deadbolt. I took out a little flashlight and looked at the door latch. The door didn't close snugly, and I could see the tongue of the spring bolt. Made duck soup look difficult.
"duck soup" は昔同義語の "piece of cake, cake, cinch, low-hanging fruit" などと一緒に覚えましたが、今回語源が気になったので調べて見ましたが、下記のサイトの情報(抜粋)からして、語源は不明の様です。
World Wide Words: It’s a weird phrase. Nobody has the slightest idea where it came from or what it refers to. The cartoon is no help, as it shows a man in a Police Court, juggling a bottle, pitcher, plate and salt shaker, with the caption “Duck Soup”. Nobody has managed to make much sense of it. It’s not even certain that TAD Dorgan actually meant by the phrase that it was something easy — it might just as well refer to something that looks easy, but is actually difficult.
Could the image be of a sitting duck, one that was on the water and easy for a hunter to shoot? Could it be that duck soup was especially easy to prepare? (I’m told that isn’t so.) Might it even refer to a pond with ducks floating on it, which figuratively was already duck soup? All these have been tentatively put forward by various writers who were feverishly exercising their imaginations in the absence of solid fact.
Vocabulary.com: There are a lot of figurative ways to say something's simple besides duck soup: easy as pie, piece of cake, and a breeze are just a few. Less easy is figuring out exactly where duck soup came from. It seems to have appeared in the early 1900's in a series of newspaper cartoons, but experts wonder about its origins — and how making duck soup could possibly be considered as easy as falling off a log.
When she was gone I took a small gym bag of tools and went to her front door. She hadn't locked it with a key when she came out, so if it was locked, it would be a spring bolt and not a deadbolt. I took out a little flashlight and looked at the door latch. The door didn't close snugly, and I could see the tongue of the spring bolt. Made duck soup look difficult.
"duck soup" は昔同義語の "piece of cake, cake, cinch, low-hanging fruit" などと一緒に覚えましたが、今回語源が気になったので調べて見ましたが、下記のサイトの情報(抜粋)からして、語源は不明の様です。
World Wide Words: It’s a weird phrase. Nobody has the slightest idea where it came from or what it refers to. The cartoon is no help, as it shows a man in a Police Court, juggling a bottle, pitcher, plate and salt shaker, with the caption “Duck Soup”. Nobody has managed to make much sense of it. It’s not even certain that TAD Dorgan actually meant by the phrase that it was something easy — it might just as well refer to something that looks easy, but is actually difficult.
Could the image be of a sitting duck, one that was on the water and easy for a hunter to shoot? Could it be that duck soup was especially easy to prepare? (I’m told that isn’t so.) Might it even refer to a pond with ducks floating on it, which figuratively was already duck soup? All these have been tentatively put forward by various writers who were feverishly exercising their imaginations in the absence of solid fact.
Vocabulary.com: There are a lot of figurative ways to say something's simple besides duck soup: easy as pie, piece of cake, and a breeze are just a few. Less easy is figuring out exactly where duck soup came from. It seems to have appeared in the early 1900's in a series of newspaper cartoons, but experts wonder about its origins — and how making duck soup could possibly be considered as easy as falling off a log.
トータル
