Somehow I though the cake idiom was similar to that french one: “vouloir le beurre et l’argent du beurre” (to want butter and money for butter) but it seems to differ more than I thought!
It’s about trying to exchange butter for money but thinking you could somehow end up with both, either intentionally by rigging a zero sum game to someone’s detriment, or mistakenly through a leap of flawed logic when one does not realise it’s zero sum, and thinks it can be outgamed with enough swapping around.
I'm 50 years old and have never understood that saying until now. Thank you!
Re:The word “decide” has deadly origins
by a1369209993 on Monday May 10, 2021 @02:52PM
(#27109463)
> a slight distortion of the original phrase, 'eat your cake and have it'
I'm partial to "eat your cake and keep it too", FWIW; "have" is ambigous.
You can't really eat cake without first having a cake to eat. If you eat it, you don't have cake any more; if you don't, you still have cake.
Therefore, if you want to eat your cake and have it, you want to do something but don't want the consequence of it.