Eating Cake — Can We Have it Too?
Is it really true that “You can’t have your cake and eat it too?”
For my entire life I’ve been hearing this colloquialism, but I never truly understood its meaning.
I’m a person with a very literal brain, so when presented with any form of fancy hyperbole, I will always imagine it literally.
“I haven’t eaten in a week, I’m starving!” (Really? How are you still alive?)
“DUDE, I took like 20 shots last night, I think I’m gonna die!” (Oh, No! I’ll call an ambulance!)
Some call it gullibility, I just call it “annoying”.
Ever since I was a young’in, I have pictured the saying “You can’t have your cake and eat it too” as if there’s a beautiful cake right in front of me, but I can’t eat it because the baker is a jerk.
I figured that it’s just a dumb saying that people use because everyone loves cake.
Then one sunny funny day, I was having a conversation with a friend and blurted out “You can’t have your cake and eat it too!”, still not knowing what the hell it meant. I was just blithely parroting it out like a moron. That day I decided to find out what it meant once and for all. I was sick of picturing a damn cake that I couldn’t eat!
I went to the trusty online repository of knowledge that is Google, and typed in “Have your cake and eat it too.” Like magic, up popped a Wikipedia page that was wholly dedicated to the saying — turns out I wasn’t the only one that didn’t understand it! What I found had me gobsmacked:
“English idiomatic proberb or figure of speech. The proverb literally means you cannot simultaneously retain your cake and eat it. Once the cake is eaten, it is gone.” (Wikipedia, 2020)
Ho-ly Bejesus — I never in a hundred years thought the cake saying would be so profound! It’s not really describing a cake at all — it’s referring to the cake as if it’s a Schrödinger’s Cat!
I will honestly never be able to look at cake the same way again. I recently had a birthday and just sat there staring at my piece of cake for a while. “If I eat you, then I won’t have you anymore.“
Now that’s what I call a “philosophical dessert”.
