Word of the Day: Millihelen
I learned a new word the other day, and I think it’s pretty cool, so we’ll make it the Word of the Day. Chances are you’re familiar with this famous quote from Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe:
“Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships/And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?”
Marlowe was writing about Helen of Troy, considered in Greek mythology the greatest beauty of her time, and whose abduction – or possibly her just absquatulating with a lover, depending on which version of the story you choose – was the cause of the Trojan War.
Oh, and for the record, “Ilium,” where those topless towers were, is just another name for “Troy,” and is not to be confused with “ilium” – the largest part of the hip bone – or “allium,” which is the Latin word for “garlic.” But I digress.
So back to the hot and handsome Helen. If hers was the flawless face that launch’d a thousand ships, then a “millihelen,” or one-thousandth of a Helen, is the exact amount of beauty required to launch one ship.
Cool, right? A useful measurement tool.
The first use of the term in print seems to be in the British satire magazine “Punch” in 1954, which attributes it to a nameless “professor of natural philosophy.” From that start in 1954 through the 1990’s, various people were given credit for coining the word, and one man, sci-fi master Isaac Asimov, took credit for coming up with the word. Let’s just say the “millihelen” is of uncertain parentage. Just like the phrase “Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes all the way to the bone.”
