A woman wrote “honey-trap” about a man and a woman in 1859, and in her sentence a man falls for a woman like a fly falling into honey.
The Oxford English Dictionary gives the earliest known use of the phrase to Elizabeth Sheppard, the English novelist who wrote Charles Auchester. It is on page 126 of the second volume of Almost a Heroine, where a man talks about a woman:
I am no fantastic fool, intoxicated by her like a fly fallen into a honey-trap. I will tell you, I know her so well as this. She is perfectly unworldly, but she is also vain of being so; and only so far is she vain at all; her fascinations and her passionate sweetness she is alike unconscious of.
Her meaning is simple. A man says he sees a woman clearly. Falling for her would be the honey-trap, and the man who falls is the fly and the fool.
John le Carré used the phrase 115 years later in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, where an intelligence service sets the honey as a trap and a woman is the bait, almost exactly as Sheppard had phrased it. He later wrote in an introduction to the novel that he invented honey-trap along with lamplighter, scalphunter and babysitter. Time magazine printed a glossary of his words and called him “their inventor”, and the dictionaries agree with him. Merriam-Webster dates the first known use to 1974, and Dictionary.com gives 1970 to 1975 and names le Carré. The OED is the only one that prints Sheppard’s line. It lists her under insect traps and starts the seduction meaning in 1974, so it still credits him.
All of these dictionaries cover English only. Writers in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Chinese used honey for a lure more than a thousand years before Sheppard or le Carré. Spies use tactics that already work, because inventing one is expensive and likely to fail. To call spy novels the source of this tactic is like saying a journalist invented the news.
| Origin | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 5th century BC, Chinese | The state of Yue sends the beauty Xi Shi to the king of Wu. Chinese calls this 美人計, the beautiful person stratagem, the thirty-first of the Thirty-Six Stratagems. |
| Hebrew, Proverbs 5:3-4 | The lips of the strange woman drip honey (נֹפֶת), and in the end she is bitter as wormwood and sharp as a two-edged sword. |
| 1st century BC, Greek | Strabo, Geography 12.3.18: the Heptacometae leave bowls of toxic honey in the road. Pompey’s soldiers eat it and three maniples are killed. |
| 1st century BC, Latin | Lucretius: doctors put honey on the rim of the cup so that children drink the wormwood. |
| 8th century, Chinese | 口蜜腹劍, honey in the mouth and a sword in the belly. The phrase describes Li Linfu, a male chancellor of the Tang court (Zizhi Tongjian, volume 215). |
| 1624, French | Francis de Sales: a spoonful of honey catches more flies than a hundred barrels of vinegar (de la Rivière, Vie, page 584). |
| 1666, Italian and English | Torriano: honey gets more flies than vinegar (Italian Proverbs, page 149). |
| 1859, English | Sheppard: a man who falls for a woman is a fly in a honey-trap. |
| 1974, English | Le Carré: a honey trap is a spy operation. |
The Chinese examples matter here more than an English dictionary because of the news. Fast Company reports that U.S. intelligence identified the woman in the Jensen Huang story as a Chinese spy. You can see above exactly for how long Chinese has named the stratagem after the beauty and uses honey for a deceitful man.
The Fast Company column is by Laëtitia Vitaud, and most of it is standard stuff. She argues that 1970s spy novel usage turns a powerful man into the helpless victim of a scheming woman. I mean we’re talking about 1970s spy novels, right? Have you read my post called James Bond Movies Are “Fascist Pig” Glorification?
Then she traces that idea all the way (fast reverse) to Genesis, where Adam blames Eve. Her report is technically accurate that it is English dictionaries who credit le Carré with making the phrase popular. The dictionaries start the phrase with the spy novelist and then credit him for it. Self-proving hypothesis. But her question is more about whether a 63-year-old chief executive officer in total command is as helpless as a bear near honey.
Her error for me is the one sentence: “The term comes from spy fiction.” No. That’s wrong. The earliest known use is Sheppard’s.
But the bigger fault is that her sentence leaves out a woman. A column about sexism repeats the error printed in dictionaries and credits a spy fiction that came 115 years after a woman printed it first.
It also costs Vitaud her best evidence for her own case. She wants the press to stop saying “honey trap”. Sheppard in fact shows a better fix, to those who are paying attention.
Celebrate Sheppard. Call it a honey trap, as she did.
In 1859 the man who falls is a “fantastic fool”, and he is responsible for where he lands. In 1974 he becomes the target of an operation, and the man who made that change claimed the invention. Vitaud’s question about the bear has had an answer since 1859. Man is but a fly.