Forum: ell.stackexchange.com
Tags: <meaning><phrases>
Title: "[A] voice that bored a thousand ships into sinking themselves"
Question: Still a line from "The Marvelous Ms. Maisel"  The character said:   And Stan...  who has a voice that bored a thousand ships into sinking themselves.   I was totally lost about this phrase.

Answers:
sents: text: It is a reference to the Iliad , in which a lady leaves her husband
text: but she was so pretty that he was willing to launch a thousand ships full of Greek soldiers to get her back.
text: So you get the saying "beautiful enough to launch a thousand ships" to mean "very pretty."
text: And now there is apparently a bloke who is so boring his voice will sink a thousand ships, that is, he is very boring.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/86157/Borgh
score: 62
sents: text: While the underlying reference, as Quuxplusone stated, is to the Iliad , the specific expression is a play on a famous line from Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus :
text: Was this the face that launched a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
text: The context is that the main character, Faust, has made a deal with the devil and gained special powers, including the ability to talk with the spirits of the dead.
text: Here, he has summoned the spirit of Helen of Troy.
text: He asks if this is really the spirit of a woman so beautiful that her abduction motivated her husband to launch a huge naval invasion to get her back.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/86228/epursimuove
score: 29
sents: text: It means that his voice was so boring that a thousand ships decided to sink themselves.
text: Compare it with the expression to talk someone into doing something .
text: talk into ( phrasal verb )
text: If you talk a person into doing something they do not want to do, especially something wrong or stupid, you persuade them to do it.
text: It's basically the same idea.
text: (answer transcribed from comment)
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/113/J.R.
score: 8
sents: text: It is a clever pun that plays on the idea of "the face that launched a thousand ships".
text: This phrase is a reference to the launching of a fleet of ships to rescue Helen of Troy, a woman of the most astounding beauty who eloped/was abducted by Paris.
text: The launching of the ships to bring her back sparked the start of the Trojan war (the Iliad).
text: It is such a poetic phrase that it is in common usage in English to describe someone of exceptional beauty ("she is beautiful enough to launch a thousand ships")
text: .The phrase "has a voice that bored a thousand ships into sinking themselves" plays with this idea to suggest that Stan's voice has a level of boredom that is as exceptional as Helen of Troy is beautiful, and does it in a clever way.
text: Rather than launching a thousand ships to rescue the most beautiful woman ever, this guys voice is so dull that a thousand captains would rather sink their own ships than listen to it.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/86305/Chris Bartlett
score: 7
sents: text: As well as what the other answers have said, the sentence is a pun.
text: The term "bore" can mean 'drill a hole in something', or can mean 'induce boredom', so the sentence has two meanings.
text: The second is that Stan's voice makes holes in ships and causes them to sink.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/86250/IFcoltransG
score: 1

Summary of the answers:
This is a pun, that refers to the Iliad. Rather than launching a thousand ships to rescue the most beautiful woman ever, this man's voice is said to be so dull that a thousand captains would rather sink their own ships than listen to it.
This is a humorous reference to the Iliad, where a woman's beauty was enough that a thousand ships were sent to bring her back. In the quote, the man is so boring that he caused a thousand ships to be sunk, either scuttled by their captains or as a pun on the word 'boring'.