Quote:
Originally Posted by Jetée
The urbandictionary sums it up quite nicely:
This phrase is easier to understand if it is read as "You can't eat your cake, and have it too". Obviously once you've eaten your cake, you won't have it any more. Used for expressing the impossibility of having something both ways, if those two ways conflict.
He works so hard to pay for that fancy house of his that he never has any time to stay home and enjoy it.
Yeah, you can't have your cake and eat it too.
In my own words:
A cake might be nice to look at, but you are faced with the decision of either being in awe of the creation or devouring it, thus tarnishing the beauty of it. It states that you cannot have everything you might want in life.
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Thankya. Good reference point.
I dunno, this seems like the kind of rhetoric that gets applied mostly after-the-fact. Here's another saying: Hindsight is 20/20. I could go on to try to finely describe the relationships intrinsic in this cake phrase, as far as I see it, but instead I'll pass go and collect $200:
Though the implied idea often exists, I think it's a phrase used mostly for destructive criticism, and is useless and stupid.
-----Added 21/8/2008 at 10 : 40 : 28-----
Quote:
Originally Posted by Charlatan
I argue that once I have eaten my cake it then goes on to become part of me. It has transformed into me through the chemistry and biomechanics of my body. I am still in possession of the cake... only now no other greedy fucker can eat it (cannibalism aside).
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Sounds to me like the cake has
you!
-----Added 21/8/2008 at 10 : 40 : 54-----
Quote:
Originally Posted by Charlatan
I am more troubled by: six of one, half a dozen of another.
Shouldn't it be: Call it six or half a dozen... it's the same. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
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Huh! Haven't heard that first one. Actually, I like it. Doubt I'll run across a circumstance to use it though. Your proposed version, while similar, seems very different in tone and use to me.