One of the most talked-about English idioms is “you can’t have your cake and eat it, too”, largely because of how confusing it seems in its current form (because of course it’s possible to have your cake and eat it). It makes more sense if you replace the “have” with “keep”, or switch the order to the traditional “you can’t eat your cake and (still) have it”.
And on that subject, the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, was identified by the FBI partly because of his use of the older phrase (“can’t eat your cake and have it, too”) rather than the bastardised modern version, in both his manifesto and a letter to his mother.
The phrase is also the source of one of my favourite (read: most terrible) jokes to tell…
Forrest Gump is in a little boat on the Alabama River, and one cold night he lights a fire for warmth, which results in his boat burning and then starting to sink. “I guess Mama was right,” he says to himself, moments before drowning, “you really can’t have your kayak and heat it too.”
Moving swiftly on to other languages, do they have equivalent phrases to having your cake and eating it? And if so, are they also nonsensical? The answer is yes, and sometimes.
Let’s start with a French idiom for someone being unrealistically greedy: vouloir le beurre et l’argent du beurre. It means “to want the butter and the money from having sold the butter”. A longer (and ruder) version is “to want the butter, the money from having sold the butter, and the milkmaid’s ass”.
A Spanish phrase for people who want it all is “you can’t be at Mass and in the tower ringing the bells”. A version from Mexican Spanish is “you can’t whistle and eat cornmeal”. And in Argentina they have “you want the pig, the 20 piglets, and the machine for making sausages”.
A Romanian version is și cu slănina-n pod, și cu varza unsă nu se poate, which means something like “you can’t have both lard in the attic and a greased cabbage stew”. Another food-related phrase is the Tamil மீசைக்கும் ஆசை கூழுக்கும் ஆசை, or “you want to both have the moustache and drink the porridge”. And one more is the Greek και την πίτα ολόκληρη και τον σκύλο χορτάτο, which means “you want the pie whole and the dog full”.
And finally, as I love both continuous prose and numbered lists (and greedily want to have both in this piece), I will leave you with a list of five more international versions of wanting to have your cake and eat it, too…
1. You want to dance at two weddings (German)
2. You want both God and the dates (Persian)
3. You want to sit on two horses with one backside (Hungarian)
4. You want to have a cask full of wine and a drunk wife (Italian)
5. You want to eat a fish and sit on a dick (Russian)
Adam Sharp is the author of The Wheel is Spinning but the Hamster is Dead: A Journey Around the World in Idioms, Proverbs and General Nonsense
Peter Trudgill is away
