Grammar Girl here. I'm Minion Fogredy and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff. Today we'll

talk about the origin of the word honeymoon and the difference between where and in which.

But first I have a correction from last week. It's pronunciation, again, my downfall.

Thanks to both Ben and Cynthia who pointed out that the Alaska Native people are not

the Tlingit. It's pronounced to clink it. And in case it helps anyone when they are editing,

I've noticed that I seem to tend to miss things when I'm really worried about something

else in the sentence or paragraph. For example, I was worried about Huchanu and I also

kept mispronouncing Admiralty Island. I had to look it up and re-recorded a bunch of

times and then I completely missed clink it and just assumed it was pronounced like it

looked from the spelling. So from now on, I'm going to remind myself to be extra careful

with words around other words that are giving me problems. And that seems like it might

be a useful editing tip for other people too. And now on to the show.

Alan on Twitter asked us to look into the origin of the word honeymoon after he got a sentence

into a lingo that included the phrase La Luna de Mille, which also seems to translate

literally to moon of honey. What does honey have to do with it? Well, let's start with

the idea of a honeymoon in general and moon cycles. Do you know that most couples get married

in the months of May through October in the United States? Well, even if you didn't

know that, you probably know what follows a wedding is the honeymoon. Today, we tend to

think about honeymoon as a vacation for newlyweds, but it used to refer to simply the 30 days

or so after a wedding, hence the word moon in honeymoon. A lunar cycle is 29.53 days

and begins with a new moon. That's when the moon, if you can see it, looks like a black

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