Having your cake and eating it too

I'm very fond of hearing and using proverbs. Obviously, when you spend most of your time speaking a language that is not your mother tongue, proverbs present a problem: they don't really make sense. Even if you understand every single word, what they mean often remains a mystery.

One proverb in particular, that has plagued me for years is: 'having your cake and eating it too'. People use it very often, usually to explain that you can't have some two things both. The number of people that use it is much larger than the number of people who can explain it though, I found.

When I asked people for an explanation, they usually wouldn't get any further than 'Well, you know, it's obvious, you can't have your cake and eat it too'. To which I would respond: 'Why would you want to have cake at all if not for eating it?!'. I had by now even come up with a rather complicated explanation, based on a Dutch saying which says you have to 'choose or distribute', which was always explained to me based on cake: to guarantee a fair distribution one person has to cut the cake, and the other person gets to pick the first piece. Surely, having your cake and eating it too must be like wanting to choose and distribute, or so I thought.

But then a few weeks ago my former roommate solved this conundrum for me: "You have to look at it as a logical problem. Once you have eaten your cake, you don't have it any more, so you can't eat your cake and still have it". To which I said: "THANK YOU!" The highly intelligent born English-speakers who read this blog will probably shrug their shoulders, but for me this was a major breakthrough.