I’ve been wondering about this; while I understand what’s meant by this phrase I don’t understand it literally. Are there people who like to have cake and not eat it? Just stare at it? Talk to it? Pet it? 
No, it’s people who eat their cake and still want to have the piece. They can’t because they’ve just eaten it. But they still want it. The same sort of idea would be captured by saying, “He wants to keep his car forever and sell it for lots of money.” The two are exclusive. One or the other, but not both.
My take has always been that fancily decorated cakes, like birthday, wedding, graduation, etc., cakes are “too pretty to eat” but the average cake connoisseur wants to see how they taste as well as look. But once you slice it to eat it, the pretty is all gone.
I have a cake in the fridge. I would like to eat my cake. However, I would also like to have a cake in the fridge, in case I want cake tomorrow. I am thus in a cake quandary.
I wish to have my cake and eat it too.
This saying has always bugged me in a vague way; not enough to seek resolution, but enough to occasionally ponder.
My usual line of thinking was, “What’s the point of having a cake if you can’t eat it?”
Thanks to you folks, one of the little, niggling worries that have plagued me for years is now resolved.
Don’t know if this is right, but I understood the phrase to have gotten turned around: “Eat your cake and have it too” conveys better the sense of wanting something you’ve just made impossible.
I always thought the saying used “have” with a shade of meaning that is older, more like “keep” or “save”. And we use “have” in the sense of “eat”, also - “I think I’ll have that slice of cake” now means the opposite of what it did in this saying. At least, this is my take on the evolution of how “have” gets used.
It’s like a lot of men who are attracted to virgins.
Virgins keep cake in the fridge?
Is that what they call it now? It’s so hard to keep up with modern slang.
Yeah, it used to be known as an “ice box” - so much more descriptive.
That’s basically correct. It made it’s first appearance in a written work called A Dialogue Conteynyng Prouerbes and Epigrammes of 1562 by John Heywood as, “Wolde ye bothe eate your cake and haue your cake?”
Source: Now You Know Almost Everything by Doug Lennox.
It’s completely nonsensical the other way around, and one of my English language pet peeves.
Random question: how is that “aue” in old quotations, like “haue” in that one, supposed to be pronounced? I seem to recall seeing it a lot in written representations of Scots, too.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
<giggling like a 12-year-old at ice box> does that mean they’re frigid too?
Yeah, baby, that’s where I musta read it. I was just leafing through a little Heywood the other day…
Wikipedia explains:
And speaking of non-cakes, my mother told me once that it is good to have your cook and eat her too.
It’s hardly nonsensical. The point of the idiom is that you want to simultaneously have two contradictory things - you want to eat the cake and not eat the cake. So if the point is the two things existing paradoxically at the same time, why quibble about which one is mentioned first?
I was going to post this, but then I realized that if you take it absolutely literally, you can “have a cake and eat it, too”. In fact, having it is a necessary prerequisite for eating it.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
You’ve defined the idiom properly, but have not described the idiom properly. See below for further explanation.
Yes. Which is the exact opposite of the definition of the idiom. It’s meant to represent two things that cannot be had at the same time.
One can have their cake and eat it, too.
One cannot eat their cake and have it, too, for once it’s eaten, it can no longer be had – it’s gone.