honey

   Used as a term of endearment since the fourteenth century, either alone or as a vocative element. In Shakespeare it is mainly used as the latter, in expressions like ‘honey nurse’, ‘sweet honey Greek’, ‘my good sweet honey lord’, but Othello addresses Desdemona as ‘honey’ on one occasion: ‘Honey, you shall be well desir’d in Cyprus.’ A moment later he calls her ‘my sweet’, which could be said to ‘translate’ the term (Othello, 2:i). In Villette, by Charlotte Brontë, a stewardess on a crosschannel ferry addresses a girl passenger as ‘honey’. Miss Brontë is at pains to point out that the stewardess is ‘vulgar’, and that she ‘Tad probably been a barmaid’. This seems to indicate that ‘honey’ was not used by polite society in the nineteenth century, though it was in common use in Miss Brontë’s part of the world then, as now, in the form ‘hinny’.

   At the end of the nineteenth century, when the Oxford English Dictionary first published its H section, the editors were of the opinion that ‘honey’ was ‘now mainly Irish’. If that was so, then it was Irish emigrants who took the expression to the USA, where it was to become firmly established, especially in the southern states. In Gone With The Wind, by Margaret Mitchell, we have Honey Wilkes, ‘so called because she indiscriminately addressed everyone from her father to the field-hands by that endearment’. Mark Twain, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, has the term being used by Jim, the black slave, to Huck. In modern times ‘honey’ is thought by many English-speakers outside America to be an especially American term. In War Brides, by Lois Battle, an Australian woman is addressed by an American sailor as honey. ‘These Americans!’ she says. ‘They haven’t any respect.’ ‘Oh, they call everyone honey,’ explains a friend. ‘It’s just their way of being friendly.’