Wouldn’t it be eat your cake and still have it? Typically you have cake before you eat it, but you don’t have cake after you eat it. So the eating would go first in the sentence, right? Unless the saying is that you want to have your cake after eating it. Either way you gotta use a word that implies the directional flow of time, because technically you do have cake for most of the duration that you’re eating it.
The idiom is generally phrased “have your cake and eat it too” but yeah that’s rather confusing. The way you said it is how I actually understand it in my head.
I think the way English Common has evolved doesn’t help either, because “to have” is now synonymous with “to eat” in the context of food, but I don’t think it was that way when the idiom was coined. It’s actually about 500 years old according to Wikipedia.
Wouldn’t it be eat your cake and still have it? Typically you have cake before you eat it, but you don’t have cake after you eat it. So the eating would go first in the sentence, right? Unless the saying is that you want to have your cake after eating it. Either way you gotta use a word that implies the directional flow of time, because technically you do have cake for most of the duration that you’re eating it.
The idiom is generally phrased “have your cake and eat it too” but yeah that’s rather confusing. The way you said it is how I actually understand it in my head.
I think the way
EnglishCommon has evolved doesn’t help either, because “to have” is now synonymous with “to eat” in the context of food, but I don’t think it was that way when the idiom was coined. It’s actually about 500 years old according to Wikipedia.