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That's a slight distortion of the original phrase, 'eat your cake and have it', and I think it makes more sense if you go to that meaning (to act, free of conse
by ljm 6y ago
That's a slight distortion of the original phrase, 'eat your cake and have it', and I think it makes more sense if you go to that meaning (to act, free of consequence). Otherwise, you're just saying that having the option to eat cake is better than not having the option to eat it, which would strike most people as being quite obvious.
You can't really eat cake without first having a cake to eat. If you eat it, you don't have cake any more; if you don't, you still have cake.
Therefore, if you want to eat your cake and have it, you want to do something but don't want the consequence of it.
- criddell 5y agoI'm 50 years old and have never understood that saying until now. Thank you!
- a1369209993 5y ago> a slight distortion of the original phrase, 'eat your cake and have it' I'm partial to "eat your cake and keep it too", FWIW; "have" is ambigous.
- lloeki 5y agoSomehow I though the cake idiom was similar to that french one: “vouloir le beurre et l’argent du beurre” (to want butter and money for butter) but it seems to differ more than I thought! It’s about trying to exchange butter for money but thinking you could somehow end up with both, either intentionally by rigging a zero sum game to someone’s detriment, or mistakenly through a leap of flawed logic when one does not realise it’s zero sum, and thinks it can be outgamed with enough swapping around.