Having cake, eating cake, a phrase's evolution and the Unabomber

Some of the most commonly known quotations are actually misquoted. Here are a few: “Play it again, Sam.” “We're going to need a bigger boat.” “Money is the root of all evil.” These examples’ initial utterance or penning can all be found and examined, and the error can be clearly noted. This makes them misquotes. 

 

Other adjacent categories to misquoting include misattribution and false quoting. The distinction between these two is the existence of a verifiable source. In a typical misattribution, a less-famous person’s bon mot is ascribed to a more-famous person. Voltaire did not write, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Voltaire’s biographer, Evelyn Beatrice Hall, coined the expression to describe his outlook on free speech. 

 

In false quoting, some screed or aphorism of unknown origin is falsely assigned to a known wit—George Carlin suffers this mightily. There is a long and dreadful essay that begins, “The paradox of our time in history…” You can find it in a click, and at a glance it is well below Carlin’s standards. False quoting is lampooned to perfection in the iconic Abraham Lincoln meme that reads, “Don't believe everything you read on the internet.”

 

A somewhat different story can be found in, “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.” It feels like misquoted Shakespeare, but it’s not. Its earliest usage appears in 16^th century letters, suggesting it was an idiomatic saying of the time. The expression is most commonly known in contemporary parlance as I have written it here, but that was not always the case. 

 

The current usage became prevalent after the 1930s, when it was commonly delivered as “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.” This logic works in that once eaten, the cake cannot be had. The modern style explains itself by saying once the eating begins, the having stops. Many of literary criticism graduate school’s leading lights have thrashed this one out, so I won’t get into it. What’s interesting is Ted Kaczynski’s involvement in this little usage melee. 

 

In his manifesto—and as a side note, anytime a piece of writing you’ve done is characterized as a manifesto, you’ve probably lost your audience—Ted Kaczynski wrote, “As for the negative consequences of eliminating industrial society, well, you can't eat your cake and have it too.” It was a sufficiently arcane usage for an FBI linguist to take note and turn up the heat on all of the smartypants suspects. Kaczynski was on FBI radar already, and upon the deeper investigation inspired by this “eat/have” variant, investigators found a letter he had written to his mother where he employed the same usage. The FBI had their man. And they ate him too.