If you watched the Netflix series about the Unabomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski, you will know he took umbrage at what he had been told by his mother was the incorrect positioning of the two verbs in the first version of these aphorisms. In his manifesto he used the uncommon variant, which alerted his brother who called the FBI. This pedantry got him caught.
‘Eat your cake and have it too’ began losing ground in the 1940s and has continued to. In fact, Kaczynski may have been the last author of this version in ‘The Unabomber Manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future’ in 1995. Using chatgpt, I couldn’t find any instances more recent.
As to which version is correct, the answer is both of them, if I follow Garner. Other writers have complained that the contemporary version doesn’t make sense. To wit, if you are in possession of the cake you can also be eating the cake; if you are eating the cake, grinding it up in your molars, you cannot also be in possession of it since it’s not cake anymore, therefore the original version has the correct phrasing.
Yea, but is it the original version? Both versions are about five hundred years old. The ‘have your cake’ version first turned up in a letter written by the Duke of Norfolk to Thomas Cromwell in 1538: ‘a man can not have his cake and eat his cake’. The version now discarded can be traced to John Heywood’s collection of sayings popular among Elizabethans of 1546, ‘Proverbs’: ‘Would ye both eat your cake and have your cake?’
Since we don’t know how long Heywood took to compile his collection, and Norfolk’s use in correspondence with the chancellor for Heny VIII occurred less than a decade prior, it is reasonable to assume both alternatives were common.
Garner points out a pair of phrases analogous to ‘having’ and ‘eating’ for cake which illustrate that the meaning doesn’t really change either way you style the phrase—spending and saving for money: ‘Assume that the phrase were you can’t spend your money and save it too; why couldn’t you just as easily say you can’t save your money and spend it too?’ (980). This may be why both phrasings remained side-by-side in usage for five centuries.
Detractors of the newer form make assumptions about the definitions of two words that occur in both phrases: and and have. As Ben Zimmer points out, if the conjunction ‘and’ indicates a chronological sequence then eating followed by having is impossible, so you cannot eat followed by have therefore justifying the phrase. However, if ‘and’ has the sense of occurring simultaneously then it doesn’t matter in what order ‘have’ and ‘eat’ occur.
The assumed definition of have in this aphorism is attended to by Garner. Instead of the sense of possession, ‘have’ can also carry the meaning ‘to partake of’ (‘I’ll have the lemon meringue’). So why can one not partake and eat at the same time? Or eat and partake at the same time.
You could always junk the whole phrase and borrow from the Russian: ‘you can’t sit on two chairs’ or the German: ‘you can’t dance at two weddings.
References:
Ben Zimmer, ‘Have Your Cake and Eat It too’, The New York Times Magazine (2011): https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/magazine/20FOB-onlanguage-t.html?auth=login-google1tap&login=google1tapg
Bryan A. Garner, Garner’s Modern English Usage (2016).
