"Well," said Pooh, "what I like best," and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called.
-- A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
Since everyone already knows where "chocolate" comes from (the Nahuatl xocolatl, duh!), today's Eat Your Words is about a sweet substance that does double duty as a term of endearment: "
honey."
From the earliest days of humans having anything that could be called civilization, honey has been the epitome of sweetness, joy, and nature's bounty. An 8,000-year-old cave painting in Valencia, Spain, shows a human figure harvesting honey from a hive while bees swarm around, while remains of actual honey have been found on the inside of clay pots in a Georgian tomb dating back to at least 2700 B.C. Ancient Egyptian and Middle Eastern cultures even used it to embalm their dead, since honey alone, among non-synthetic foods, magically keeps forever.
So, understandably, the word's history goes back a ways, to what linguists call Proto-Indo-European, or PIE for short. According to the widely held PIE theory, almost all of the European languages and the languages spoken from Iran to India came from one source, a group of people who probably lived somewhere between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. This group of people somehow successfully spread out all over Eurasia, and languages as seemingly different as Greek, German, Latin, and Hindi all evolved out of that mother tongue.
