Let them eat…
Mary Anne was talking about eating cake the night before surgery. I noted that cake is the best medicine.
Which led me to think there could be a whole series of proverbs with “cake” substituted in, along the lines of the Star Wars “pants” meme (that linked-to Words & Stuff column is NSFW; the pants quotes are at the end of it).
So I came up with the following:
- Cake is a dish best served cold.
- Red cake at morning, sailors take warning; red cake at night, sailors delight.
- A cat may look at a cake.
- All cake comes to he (or she) who waits.
- All that glisters is not cake.
- An army marches on its cake.
- You made your cake; now you have to lie in it.
- Half a cake is better than none.
- You can't make a cake without breaking a few eggs.
- Cake is wasted on the young.
- Misery loves cake.
Eric Z replied with a comment about “the boy who cried cake.”
And then Shmuel took the idea and ran with it:
- It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of cake.
- It was the best of cake, it was the worst of cake.
- Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover cake.
- They say when cake comes close ranks, and so the white people did.
- There was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved cake.
- He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the cake which swung from the rafters.
- Cake, light of my life, fire of my loins . . .
As Mary Anne noted, that last one may be hard to top.
However, I invite y'all to try, or at least to have fun with the idea. Take a well-known phrase, saying, or quotation, substitute in “cake” for one or more words, and post it as a comment here.
Okay to make slight alterations to make the grammar come out right, make it funnier, or otherwise improve the MFQ, but try to stick close to the original where possible.
