For the record

Probably one of my greatest language pet peeves is the misuse of sayings and idioms. As a linguist and grammar maven, I feel it is incumbent on me to clarify these misuses from time to time, so may I begin…

having your cake and eating it too
The correct expression, if you wish to be truthful or at least make some sense, is “You cannot EAT your cake and HAVE it too”, not the other way around.

Why? Good question.

For the semantics among us, the two expressions are propositionally equivalent. If we follow propositional logic, the ordering of phrases should not matter. “You cannot X & Y” is logically the same as “you cannot Y & X.” But we are not talking about semantic or propositional equivalence. We are talking about functional equivalence. If we take the interpretation of and to mean “and then” (and there’s psycholinguistic work to suggest that this is a ‘default’ interpretation of and), then the two expressions “you cannot have your cake and then eat it too” and “you cannot eat your cake and then have it too” are not describing the same series of events or possible worlds. Thus, they do not mean the same things.

The first assertion is just false. Of course you can have your cake and then eat it. How else could you eat something if you didn’t first have it? However, you cannot eat something and then ‘have’ it, where have means something along the lines of ‘holding’ or ‘possessing’, unless you want to count digested form as ‘possession’. So for the love of truth and function, let’s get it right: You cannot eat your cake and have it too!