why do people say “they want to have their cake and eat it”?
because there’s no bloody point in having a piece of cake, and not eating it, is there?
4 thoughts on “why?”
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why do people say “they want to have their cake and eat it”?
because there’s no bloody point in having a piece of cake, and not eating it, is there?
Comments are closed.
In case you were really curious ..
Originally “you can’t eat your cake and have it”
Though presumably rather older, it is first written down in John Heywood’s A Dialogue Conteynyng Prouerbes and Epigrammes of 1562: “Wolde ye bothe eate your cake, and haue your cake?”. John Keats quoted it as eat your cake and have it at the beginning of his poem On Fame in 1816; Franklin D Roosevelt borrowed it in that form for his State of the Union Address in 1940;
It (obviously) means that you can’t, at the same time, have a cake (in front of you) and consume it. It’s a sort of “exclusion principle” thing.
I assume that the original stated it backwards – that you can’t eat your cake and [still] have it [on your plate].
But who knows. Deducing an origin for “It’d be cheap at half the price” sometimes causes me to pause for thought. Clearly intended to be sarcastic, surely it should be “It’d be cheap at twice the price”. As it stands, it probably *would* be cheap at half the price. Most things would be. 🙂
Because if you can eat your cake but still have it, then you can eat it again 😉
Yes – while uneaten it represents potential value to you. You might for instance want to give it to someone else to eat. Clearly you can’t do that if you’ve eaten it. Hence its use to refer to someone who desires incompatible things. My theory anyway:-)