Good evening chaps and chapettes. There's an old, but still commonly used phrase that's been eating away at me for a while, and i need to get it off my chest:
"To have your cake, and eat it too"
I know what it means; something along the lines of having the best of both sides of a decision, and none of the negatives; but it just seems so... inappropriate. For one thing, what is the point of having cake, if not to eat it? It would have to be a really beautiful cake for me to enjoy possessing it as much as i enjoyed eating it. For me, to have cake IS to eat it.
I suppose the rebuttal to this would be "ah, but then you won't have the cake anymore, hence the benefit of the 'have your cake' half of the phrase". At the risk of sounding like Marie Antoinette, JUST GET MORE CAKE! There is a finite supply of cake in the world, but you would never be able to eat that much without getting sick of it.
So in summary, it is a stupid phrase because cake holds very little value except when eaten. Perhaps a more appropriate phrase would be "To have your cute baby lamb and eat it too".
Never heard of that phrase before, but it sounds weird.
ReplyDeleteThat's the weird thing about idioms, they often arise out of bizarre settings.
ReplyDeleteOften literal meaning of idioms is somewhat strange.
ReplyDelete