Apparently I never understood this saying until today.
I still don’t think I fully understand, even as the unabomber put it. Can’t eat it and have it? Like, I can’t consume and expect the thing to remain, that it?
Side note: only in English, one can “understand”, but nobody can “overstand” and anybody that “stand” is doing a wholly different thing.
It comes down to “You can’t have the best of two situations. Pick one.”
Ah, that’s much more helpful, thanks!
Yeah, I think that’s it?
Yes it means for you to get one cake. Then eat the cake and yet still have the one cake you got.
that brother is a fucking snitch
The phrase makes no sense to me at first glance because if I say “I’m going to have some cake” what I mean is I am going to eat it.
You can’t eat your cake and eat it too!
Pfft hold my milk
Weirdo. The rest of us mean that we are going to posses some amount of cake for a period of time.
Don’t speak on my behalf. That’s not what I mean when I say I’m having some food. “Yes waiter I’ll have the steak. Not for eating. Just for possessing ike a psychopath.”
What do you want to do with cake other than eat it though? Apart from saving it for later because the only thing you’d be saving it for later is to eat it later.
Own the cake, obviously.
LOL that’s awesome.
The statement has been around since the 1530s; it’s probably due for some modernization.
I’d love to hear the Unabomber’s takes on “taking a piss/shit.”
I leave a shit, there’s no shit when I return, so presumably someone came and took a shit. What they did with that shit, I prefer not to know, but I’m not going to fault such a vital function.
That’s going to be me and my peeve regarding the malapropism “assless chaps”.
Chaps with asses are PANTS!
(Turns back to manual typewriter and resumes typing furiously.)
To me when someone says assless chaps it refers to the configuration of wearing chaps without anything underneath. Similar to “going commando” being a configuration of clothing meaning pants with no underwear.
In that case, I feel like the correct phrasing should be pantsless chaps.
Yeah, but I’m still gonna be salty about it.
Indeed, chaps by definition have no ass.
They’re assless pants, really.
Tangentially, I hate it that pulling someone’s pants down became popular and was called “pantsing.” You’re not putting pants ON the person…
My (completely un-researched, straight from my ass) hypothesis is that the term comes from British English and not American English. In the UK “pants” are your underwear, so “pansting” somebody is exposing their underwear.
Weird, I thought they were called bloomers or knickers.
Those are girl’s pants.
I hate it that pulling someone’s pants down became popular and was called “pantsing.” You’re not putting pants ON the person…
Do you feel similarly about shelling peanuts?
Oh excellent point, I hadn’t thought about it.
I think it’s different for parts of living things.
Shelling is removing the entire shell. “Peeling” something doesn’t mean adding peel, and “pitting” means removing the pit.
However, for bodies, removing skin in general is “skinning,” but if you lose the skin of just your hand it’s called de-gloving. Removing the bowels isn’t called “boweling,” but “disembowling.”
If I said someone did a “shirting,” maybe I’m weird but I’d think of getting hit with a shirt before removing someone’s shirt. And in hockey, a “jerseying” is more about pulling the jersey over the head than removing it.
Removing the bowels isn’t called “boweling,” but “disembowling.”
But the synonymous process of removing the guts is called gutting.
That’s true, but I would argue “gut” is more colloquial.
Like, to “behead” someone means to remove their head, but it’s also colloquial. Whereas decapitation is the more medical term.
Should it be de-pantsing, or disempantsing, then? I think it’d be the former, but I want it to be the latter
I think most people would say “de-pants” but I agree with you that it SHOULD be disempantsing.
Though I’m worried the “em” implies the pants are being extracted.
“Dis-pantsing” is also really good though. Then when it happens people can be like “Jimmy got a dis-pants-ation”
The difference between pants and chaps is more than just the presence or absence of an ass. There’s the whole area between the legs. You can have chaps with an ass in the same way you can have a shirt with sleeves.
Counterpoint, saying “assless” is fun, and saying “assless pants” would probably make most people confused
“assless pants” would probably make most people confused
That depends on who is wearing them
Chaps with asses are gentlemen.
Everything must have the Oxford comma! reeeeeeeeeee
What a coincidence - I just finished the Manhunt: Unabomber TV series. It’s well made, reminded me of Mindhunter. And very sympathetic towards Ted Kaczynski actually. Highly recommend it if you haven’t seen it.
I am staunchly against randomly murdering people with package bombs. But they put that poor man through hell with the MK Ultra stuff.
The big monsters that run our world turned a brilliant mind into a little monster. A massive tragedy from every angle
Do you know what they actually did with Ted in MKULTRA? It wasn’t drugs in his case.
He was the isolation subject, no? Pretty much made the guy a patsy to get him socially exiled from his college campus while they ran him through the program?
No they set him up with a prosecutor out of Boston that Ted thought was another student. The prosecutor’s job was to argue against any position that kaczynski took… Completely undermining his internal Tom Tom
Debating
Right! Thank you, frankly that era of Cold War adjacent shit makes me feel like I need to give my computer a bath just thinking about it. Appreciate the reminder!
Sounds interesting, where did you watch it?
Ah sorry for the tease lol it was free on Prime yesterday but the deadline JUST passed. Had to binge watch it quick over the last 2 days. But I’ve seen it before on Netflix too, so I’m sure it’ll get rotated to another platform at some point.
Reminds me the advice “when commiting crime put a rock in your boots so people can’t recognize you by your walking style.”
Is it really pedantry if the phrase makes no sense with the incorrect order
Its like “I could care less” - so you do care? Start making sense and I’ll understand you. Words have meaning god damn it.
It’s only pedantry if you force others to do it your way.
Idioms don’t have to make literal sense. How do you feel about being “head over heels” about someone?
It should be heels over head, obviously. It probably was that way.
In my language, we say “neck over head”
I dont like it
If a phrase conveys the opposite of their literal meaning, and the speaker and the audience both know it, then it is pedantic. Choosing to derail whatever the topic is in favor of criticizing someone’s understandability when everyone did understand them is pedantic.
I get it, I hate the way people use “literally”. It’s terrible, it’s usually unneeded, and it just makes any actual correct use of literally have less impact. But I’m not gonna correct people who say it wrong, because I do know what they meant.
If they said “I could care less” and you’re comfortable enough in your understanding of the conversation to know for a fact they actually mean they do not care about it, then they did make sense and you did understand them.
And of course literally has been used in both sense for hundreds of years.
If they said “I could care less” and you’re comfortable enough in your understanding of the conversation to know for a fact they actually mean they do not care about it
And what if I am not comfortable enough in my understanding? When someone is hard to understand because of how non-standard their use of language is, it is a communication barrier, not just pedantry.
It’s not like that at all. “I could care less” is just wrong. The phrase is “I couldn’t care less.” “I could care less” is more like “one and the same” or “for all intensive purposes.”
“I could care less” is more like “one and the same” or “for all intents and purposes.”
I think you got that mixed up there 🤔
Guess my brain couldn’t bear to type “all intensive purposes.”
Just because you’re being pedantic doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wrong to say it.
I’ve always taken “I could care less” to be sarcastic. Like “It’s technically possible, but quite unlikely.”
yes it really is
I’m not sure what part doesn’t make sense about the original
have your cake and eat it too
Alone it sounds normal but doesnt make sense in context because its supposed to be
eat your cake and have it too
Because the idiom is supposed to mean that you can’t eat it and somehow still have it. The first implies you got cake and then were unable to eat it which doesnt make sense because thats literally the point of cake
Wikipedia:
you cannot enjoy two incompatible things at the same time; once you eat the cake, you no longer have it. It highlights the idea of trade-offs or making choices in life.
Apparently have is supposed to be synonymous with “keep” but language has evolved
It can sound misleading but the second part doesn’t actually mean the “having” at the first part has ended. It’s not incorrect, it’s just more confusing than the other way around.
I wouldn’t say the language has changed. You either have something or don’t. If you eat your cake you don’t have it anymore
/c/badlinguistics
Yeah if they cared enough to care less. Therefore they don’t care enough to care less about something.
Therefore they couldn’t care less, by your own logic
They could care less, they just don’t care enough to want to care less.
There was a reverse of that scenario in our neck of the wood where the murderer phoned the cops with details only he would know (from a payphone close to where he worked), and although his voice was recognized by a relative, his (somewhat successful) defence was that he never pronounced “creek” as “crick.”
That’s goddamn wild
is the problem being pedantic or having a snitch brother
Pretty sure his brothers wife played a big part.
no that was the butthole surfers
