Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases

Grenville Kleiser's 1917 thesaurus of literary expression is the kind of reference book that goes out of fashion every decade and comes back the decade after. Fifteen thousand idioms, similes, metaphors, polished turns of phrase, and ready-made elegances of style, organised by part of speech and by subject. Kleiser was a Yale-trained lecturer on rhetoric, and the book reads like the workshop notes of a writing teacher who has spent thirty years collecting examples.

The categories are admirably mid-Atlantic: striking similes ('clear as a mountain spring'), useful phrases ('a casual remark of singular felicity'), literary expressions ('the lamp of life'), business phrases, public-speaking openings, conversational set-pieces. The alphabetised dictionary of expressive verbs in Part II is its own peculiar pleasure to browse.

Modern writing manuals scorn this kind of book as a recipe for purple prose, and they have a point — uncritical use will produce the literary equivalent of a brass band. But used the way Kleiser intended — as a stretching exercise for the imagination, a way to break out of the same five idioms one always reaches for — it remains genuinely useful. The book is also a snapshot of what "good English" sounded like in 1917, before American business prose flattened the language.