You Can't Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

In one episode of the podcast A Way with Words, a listener brought up a story about her family, who would always say to her, “You’re trying to have your cake and eat it too! (You can’t do both!)”. As she listened, she thought in the back of her head, “What’s the point of having a cake, if you can’t eat it too?”

“To have one’s cake and eat it” or its variant is a common idiom meaning “to enjoy two desirable but mutually exclusive alternatives”. This is often used in the form “you can’t have your cake and eat it too”. The misleading (and funny) part of this idiom is that the meaning of the word “have” is ambiguous and can mean both “to keep” and “to hold in your hand”.

Actually, the reason I wanted to write about this is because I came across the following expression in a book today:

The surface structure, […], allows the cake to be both eaten and had.¹

The author uses the same words “eat” and “have”, but in this order, the ambiguity is not a problem. Once you’ve eaten your cake, you can neither keep it nor hold it in your hand.