Why Can't I Have My Cake and Eat It Too?

Your problem with the wording of this saying is a common one. However, this saying might make more sense and cause less head scratching if the key clauses were reversed:

You can't EAT your cake and HAVE it too.

In this reversed wording order, where you EAT your cake first it is gone and your desire to also HAVE your cake (to eat later) is a greedy impossibility. Some of the earliest recorded usages of the saying have this particular order of the clauses. So, a large part of the reason the saying seems disjointed is this clause-order controversy.

Perhaps our language has decayed. You can have your cake, then eat it. No problem.

But you can have your cake AND eat it at the exact same time -- as soon as you eat it, you don't really have it anymore.

So, if you need the cake to make a great impression at the party, you can't eat it. You need to wait until you've made the impression, and THEN you can eat it.

Literally, it's exactly right. But, the way we use "and" these days, it sounds awfully funny.

How about "You can not enjoy the sight of a beautiful cake and the taste of the cake. If you eat it , you enjoyed it , but you forfeit the other enjoyment."

You can have a cake and then eat it, after which you no longer have the cake except in your tummy.