Someone was not sober when they made up this etymology.
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Bill Brohaugh
This word-history canard wanders about in various forms—here’s one I encountered recently: “It was the accepted practice in Babylonia 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride’s father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer, and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the ‘honey month’ or what we know today as the ‘honeymoon.’”
The etymology is fanciful (and even—appropriate to the thought of honeymooning—romantic), but unlikely. 34 The etymology denies two aspects of word creation:
1) Simplicity. Why wouldn’t whoever created the word (long after the reign of the Babylonians, considering that these ancients probably didn’t speak English) have called it “meadmonth” in direct reference to the mead and not to one of its ingredients?
2) Poetry. Fact is, people have poetry in our souls and our words. The more accepted etymology for this word supposes that honey is used figuratively, to refer to the sweetness of that first month of marriage. Also in poetic reference, the month is referred to as moon. And in fact, it’s likely that there’s dark poetry involved—a cynical implication that the first sweet weeks wane as quickly as the new moon.
Finally, the mead bacchanalia explanation also denies one aspect of human nature: As Word Detective Evan Morris has written, “Why did the bride’s father want his new son-in-law dead drunk for the first month of his daughter’s marriage?”
i4 For some reason, tales espousing the mead-extravaganza explanation embellish it by noting that Attila the Hun supposedly died on his honeymoon night because he was so drunk that he choked to death. Now there’s a romantic thought. And one that ignores the fact that Attila had had many honeymoon nights and many drunken sprees before then. He was a barbarian, after all. I can see it now, a bullshittemetymology that Attila was so Hunnie he mooned everyone.