>>>hmmm...so you have to have a prescription to get it, but they want to tax it because it's not a prescription drug. Interesting...talk about having your cake and eating it too...geeze.
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>>Nope, it's a catch-22.
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>>This cake business I actually never understood. If you can't have your cake and eat it too, what does it mean when you're offered to "have a cake"? Own it for a while, but you can't eat it?
>
>That's exactly why I have insisted for years that the proper expression is "You can't eat your cake and have it too." I mean how else are you going to eat it except by having it?

"Have a ~~~" seems to my foreign ears just wrong. To me, it sounds like "posess a ~~~", or "own a ~~~". I know that "have" has about 50 meanings, but this possessive somehow overrides, or at least overshadows, the others. For most of things offered, it's "take a ~~~" (chair, as much time as you want, try, another one, walk). Food seems that unlucky exception where [S]possession makes 90% of the law[/S] whoever accepts the offer is supposed to be just happy to have acquired the offering, and the actual consumption is not offered. Well, maybe implicitly.

Sounds almost as blunt as the Hungarian phrase "foglalj a hely[e acute]t" - "occupy a seat". Like, "go ahead, take up some of my space, you're no good for anything better than that".

We're lucky that most of the speech is actually ceremonial and not given any thought. Once you start looking into it, you find all sorts of flotsam.