In my previous reader response, I mentioned the puzzling proverb “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” Matthew Parry writes: “I’d always found ‘have your cake and eat it too’ perplexing, too, until it was pointed out the reversed construction makes sense: ‘You can’t eat your cake and have it too.’ Of course, everyone thinks I’m misquoting when I say this now!”

The version of the proverb with “eat your cake” followed by “having it” does make more sense to many people, and that is in fact how it was first formulated in English. The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs quotes a 1546 compendium by John Heywood, “Wolde ye bothe eate your cake, and haue your cake?” In his Yale Book of Quotations, Fred Shapiro supplies a more typical phrasing from John Davies in 1611: “A man cannot eat his cake and haue it stil.”

The point of the aphorism is that sometimes you have to make a choice between two options that cannot be reconciled. In Russian, you’d say, “You can’t sit on two chairs,” and in German, “You can’t dance at two weddings.” (Yiddish borrows the German saying and tartly adds “...with one tuchis.”)

By the time Jonathan Swift was writing his great parodies, the “cake” proverb must have already seemed rather musty, because he puts in the mouth of one of the fatuous characters in his 1738 farce, “Polite Conversation”: “She cannot eat her cake and have her cake,” says Lady Answerall. Swift’s satirical dialogue is jam-packed with hoary clichés, along with words that he considered silly and faddish. (He jeered at abbreviated forms like phiz for physiognomy, rep for reputation, and mob for the Latin phrase mobile vulgus.)