Meaning
The early phase of anything - marriage, government, job, merger - when goodwill runs ahead of experience and nothing has yet gone wrong. The phrase always carries its own expiry: honeymoons, by definition, end. Standard in politics and employment; the tone is gently fatalistic - the phrase exists to note the ending. Regional use: General English; from the marriage word.
Origin
Honey moon was already proverbial in 1546, and its image is bleaker than the modern sense: affection like the moon, no sooner full than it begins to wane - Richard Huloet's 1552 dictionary defines the honey mone as newlyweds' exceeding love, expected to abate. The teutonic mead-drinking month is a contested later theory, not the record. The vacation sense arrived by 1791 in translation and natively by 1804, and the twentieth century took the word figurative: John Reed wrote of revolutionary Russia in 1919 that the 'honeymoon' was short, and Gerald Ford's 1977 farewell asked the country for not a honeymoon but a good marriage. Modern political journalism runs on the figure - any honeymoon for the new government is over, as a 2024 headline had it - the moon still waxing and waning exactly as Huloet promised.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- honeymoon phase
- on honeymoon
- the honeymoon is over
Usage Examples
- The new manager's honeymoon period lasted one unbeaten month and one dropped crossbar.
- Voters grant every government a honeymoon period; pollsters date its end to the first budget.
- Their literal honeymoon financed the figurative one entirely: the boatyard let them live aboard.