Cherry pick

Cherry picker is originally a British nautical expression, dating from the late 19th/early 20th century for an inferior seaman who would pick or choose the easier tasks aboard ship, from the obvious allusion to picking the best fruit from a bowl of cherries or picking the cherry off the top of a dessert. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary cites the first known usage as 1965 but because of the earlier nautical use of the expression it was probably much earlier.