Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

One of English's older surviving proverbs, first recorded in a 1538 letter from Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk, to Thomas Cromwell: "a man can not have his cake and eat his cake." It appears again, more famously, in John Heywood's 1562 proverb collection, phrased the other way round from how we say it today: "Wolde ye bothe eate your cake, and haue your cake?" That original word order actually makes the logic clearer, once you've eaten the cake, you obviously can't still have it, and the now-standard "have it and eat it too" ordering only became the more common form in the 20th century.