milli-Helen, milliHelen, as a unit of beauty (1958 March 11)

[Garson O'Toole]

On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 9:53 AM, Jesse Sheidlower <jester at panix.com> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jesse Sheidlower <jester at PANIX.COM>
> Subject:      Re: milli-Helen, milliHelen, as a unit of beauty (1958 March 11)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 08:04:29AM -0400, Stephen Goranson wrote:
>
>> The original being:
>>
>> 1958 _Manchester Guardian_ 26 Feb. 5/3 A correspondent in a Sunday paper
>> has suggested that psychologists, intoxicated by their success in
>> measuring intelligence, are hoping to measure feminine beauty in precise
>> units. He suggests that the unit proposed will be the ‘milli-helen’—‘the
>> quantity of beauty required to launch exactly one ship’.
>>
>> Not sure which "Sunday paper" this is itself copied from.
>>
>> Jesse Sheidlower
>> OED
>>
>> Letters to the Editor
>> The Observer, Sunday,  Feb 23, 1958; page 8, col. 4, letter with the above quote from R. E. Dickinson (I think,
>> the scan is rather poor)
>> http://search.proquest.com/hnpguardianobserver/docview/475346069/fulltextPDF/12FE411C6F1632F9A2A/1?accountid=10598
>>
>
> Stephen,
>
> May I ask how you tracked this down? In trying to find this myself
> _after_ you posted this, I searched for several variants of
> "milli-helen", "quantity", "beauty", and "ship", and even looking at
> that one issue of the Observer, the search engine didn't turn up this
> letter. I had to navigate there by hand to confirm it (and you are
> right, it is there).
>
> Jesse Sheidlower
> OED

Thanks to Wilson, Laurence, Jesse, and Stephen for their comments.
Special thanks to Jesse and Stephen for obtaining and sharing
wonderful discoveries.

Since Stephen has not replied yet I'll offer an idea. Jesse's
uncovering of the February 26, 1958 match for milli-Helen in the
Manchester Guardian did suggest one strategy for locating the earlier
occurrence. The text provided a clue: "a correspondent in a Sunday
paper". This lead implied that a manual search through a previous
Sunday paper might succeed.

February 23, 1958 is the date of the previous Sunday, and The Observer
is the companion Sunday paper to The Guardian, nowadays. (I do not
know how the newspapers were related in 1958.) So, an indefatigable
individual might manually scan the February 23 issue of The Observer
and read all the correspondence looking for milli-Helen.

I think it would be difficult to find milli-Helen in the February 23
issue with an electronic search. I just attempted a variety of queries
in the digital archive of The Guardian and The Observer and each query
failed to locate the February 23 instance. This experience is similar
to the one Jesse described above. (Yet, several queries did match the
February 26 instance.)

(Searches are free. I did not pay to actually look at the images for
the matches, and I do not have access to the ProQuest database for The
Guardian and The Observer.)

Garson

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