Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake…
April 14, 2009 9:48 pmA friend of mine and I were recently having a conversation in which the following commonplace proverb seemed to describe the situation well…
You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
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I believe the context of our conversation had something to do with the auto industry and the current global economic crisis.
Our profound musings amounted to something like this; you can’t have responsible spending and excessive profits at the same time. If people figure out that they do not need a new car every 3 years, then you don’t need as many cars, and there will not be as much profit to be made in the auto industry.
We both knew what we meant as we nodded in agreement to the saying, but somehow the adage did not quite have the punch we were demanding of it… it seemed so easily disproved. By the experience of attending any single birthday party or wedding, this bit of proverbial admonishment can be quickly undone; indeed people have cake and eat it all the time.
So we did what any responsibly confused 21st century thinkers guided by curiosity and technology would do, we Wikipediaed it (now a real word, you can Wiktionary it here), and discovered the supposed original ordering of the saying yields a much more profound statement.
Translated to modern english from the original 1546 record, the idiom should read…
You can’t eat your cake and have it too.
It took nearly 300 years for the wording to get turned around, but once done it may be impossible to restore it to its original power.
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 signaled in 1812.
Subtle refinements of language have a tendency to remove their potency over time. I am reminded of C. S. Lewis’s discussion of the loss of meaning in the term “Gentlemen”, which at one time was reserved for property owners, then was slowly turned into men of noble regard, then further digressed into “guys that are nice”, and now it can be loosely applied to anyone who enters a strip club.
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