" She looked as though she could be of any ethnicity, or of all at once--if "beautiful" and its synonyms and cognates weren't so diluted with every other word or phrase that they had ever been paired with, I would now employ them all in earnest. But to use descriptors of Helen of Troy would be to so utterly understate the matter that the severity of misdescription would plunge the language into total semantic collapse. "

― Jack Foster , Fresh Fruit: A Preface