Cake

Well, all of us have heard the quote "To eat your cake and have it too". And whilst I have an idea what it is supposed to mean, there seems to be a pit fall in logic. I think whoever phrased it seems to have assumed that having the cake is as important as eating it; which is not really always the case. If you don't eat it, don't you think having it is useless in the first place [:)] . Secondly, with its limited life, you can't hold it long either; whether you eat it or not. So you might not have the cake even if you don't eat it. And if you ate the cake, it seems irrelevant whether you had it or not [;)]. Hence, since eating the cake seems to carry more weight, the two actions should not be dealt in unison.

And while I was writing this trash, I made a quick check on what Wikipedia has to say about the phrase. Some exerpts from it:

The phrase's earliest recording is from 1546 as "wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?" (John Heywood's 'A dialogue Conteinyng the Nomber in Effect of All the Prouerbes in the Englishe Tongue') alluding to the impossibility of eating your cake and still having it afterwards; the modern version (where the clauses are reversed) is a corruption which was first signalled in 1812.

Comedian George Carlin once critiqued this idiom by saying, "When people say, 'Oh you just want to have your cake and eat it too.' What good is a cake you can't eat? What should I eat, someone else's cake instead?".

Paul Brians, Professor of English at Washington State University, points out that the original and only sensible version of this saying is “You can’t eat your cake and have it too,” meaning that if you eat your cake you won’t have it any more. People get confused because we use the expression “have some cake” to mean “eat some cake,” and they therefore misunderstand what “have” means in this expression.^[1] Alternatively, people understand that "have" and "eat" represent a sequence of actions, so one can indeed "have" one's cake and then "eat" it. Consequently, the literal meaning of the reversed idiom doesn't match the metaphorical meaning.

To sum up, I should go home now.

---------

[:)]