"You can't have your cake and eat it too" - is a very badly phrased proverb, for two reasons.
1. Having cake is intended to mean something like "hoarding", "retaining", or "continuing to possess" your cake.
Yet having a cake usually means to eat that cake - which meaning obliterates the point of the proverb...
Or rather makes it an oxymoron something like: "You can't both eat your cake, and eat it as well"...
Nonsense
2. "Eat it too" is spoiled by the double meaning of "too" when the word is heard but not read; which was how I first encountered this proverb, as a child.
The intended meaning is of course: "too" meaning "as well" or "at the same time".
But the other meaning of the sound "two" is the number - and this is just confusing.
To work properly the proverb would need to be made unambiguous; something like:
You can't both eat and keep a cake.
4 comments:
you may or may not know that Theodore Kaczynski was outed as the Unabomber through his letters to his brother, after a comparison between them and the famous essay about industrial society. one of the pieces of evidence was the fact that both in the letter and in the essay he insisted that the proverb was being misquoted. originally it was 'eating your cake and having it too', and he liked to correct people on it.
the original suffers less from the problems you pointed out, in my opinion.
It always grosses me out, if you'll forgive the expression, because I imagine somebody puking out the cake and eating it again.
Then there's "you can't turn the clock back", despite the fact that innumerable people do this every day.
@Laeth "the original suffers less from the problems you pointed out, in my opinion"
Not really... The *main* problem - the ambiguity of "having" - remains.
@M - " "you can't turn the clock back"" - Good example. I'm guessing you got it from GKC?
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