For those unfamiliar with it, the proverb may sound confusing due to the ambiguity of the word 'have', which can mean 'keep' or 'to have in one's possession', but which can also be used as a synonym for 'eat' (e.g. 'to have breakfast').
Some find the common form of the proverb to be incorrect or illogical and instead prefer: "You can't eat your cake and [then still] have it (too)".
[15] According to Google Ngram Viewer, a search engine that charts the frequencies of phrases in archived historical (written) documents over time, the eat-have order used to be the most common variant, before being surpassed by the have-eat version in the 1930s and 40s.
Several pages into John Galt’s famous monologue, he employs the proverb as an analogy in simple terms: “You cannot have your cake and eat it, too”.
James R. Fitzgerald, an FBI forensic linguist, noted the then-uncommon variant of the proverb and later discovered that Kaczynski had also used it in a letter to his mother.
[21][22] The expressions, which reverse the traditional proverb, refer to a wish to enjoy two desirable but incompatible alternatives, especially regarding the UK’s approach to Brexit negotiations and subsequent deliberations.
"[28] According to Paul Brians, Professor of English at Washington State University, the idiom confuses many people because the verb to have, can refer to possessing, but also to eating, e.g. "Let's have breakfast" or "I'm having a sandwich".
[29] Ben Zimmer, writing for the Language Log of the University of Pennsylvania, states that the interpretation of the two variants relies on the assumption of either sequentiality or simultaneity.
[30] Zimmer reacted to Mason by stating: "the 'having' part of the idiom seems to me to imply possession over a long period of time, rather than the transient cake-having that occurs during cake-eating".
"Few people protest the expression head over heels to mean 'topsy-turvy,' despite the fact that its "literal" reading describes a normal, non-topsy-turvy bodily alignment".