Here's what 'have your cake and eat it too' really means

There's an idiom that you might have heard before. It goes like this: "You can't have your cake and eat it, too."It seems nonsensical, right' "Of course you can have your cake and eat it too!" you might say. If you eat something, you're having it! It should work thesame way you might "have a beer" or "have dinner." Eating is a form of demonstrating ownership. If you eat something, you es it.The phrase, as the linguistic historianBen Zimmer wrote in The New York Times Magazine, makes more sense when you reverse the construction, so it goes like this:"You cant eat your cake and have it, too."In this case, the sequence of the verbs changes and the meaning becomes more clear. Once you eat your cake, you have no cake left. It means you can't eat a cake and continue topossessthat cake once you've consumed it.The use of the phrase, therefore, is to tell someone that they can'thave two good things that don't normally go together at the same time, like eating a cake and then continuing to possessthat samecake soyou can eat later.By now, the use of the word "have" in the English language has evolved to alsoencompass the meaning of "eat." "Have your cake and eat it, too"is outdated and perhaps, as Zimmer writes,it's time to retire the phrase. Join the conversation about this storyNOW WATCH: A psychologist reveals a trick to stop being lazy
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