Grenville Kleiser is a name that will doubtless continue to be revered in many years time. His pretensions are apparent in his bibliography (here considerably abbreviated): Business Building and Speech Efficiency; Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases: A Practical Handbook Of Pertinent Expressions, Striking Similes, Literary, Commercial, Conversational, And Oratorical Terms, For The Embellishment Of Speech And Literature, And The Improvement Of The Vocabulary Of Those Persons Who Read, Write, And Speak English; How to Build Mental Power; How to Develop Power and Personality in Speaking; How to Develop Self Confidence in Speech and Manner; Make Your Life Worth Living; Phrases for Public Speakers and Paragraphs for Study; Talks on Talking; Talking for Results; The Training of a Public Speaker; and Training for Power and Leadership.

I think that short list of books clearly adumbrates the character and style of Mr Kleiser.While any of these books would well repay any attention given to it, I found my attention irresistably drawn to the Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases. Who would I be, I asked myself, to reject Pertinent Expressions and Oratorical Terms, if they were offered to me? So I proceeded on what I will always consider one of the greatest adventures of my life.

I found to my delight that the Useful Phrases were divided into sections. This was to my mind a great contribution to publishing. The Phrases were divided into Useful, Significant, Felicitous, Impressive, Prepositional, Business, Conversation, Public Speaking and Miscellaneous Phrases, with Literary Expressions and Striking Similes added on for good measure.

The unintelligent reader might find the difference between Useful, Significant, Felicitous and Impressive Phrases to be difficult to imagine. But it takes only a slight perusal to discover that the major difference is the number of words in each Phrase. Two words make up each Useful Phrase, three each Significant, four for the Felicitous and five for the Impressive Phrases. But what words! They are worthy of ‘fervent, enthusiastic, anxious, and zealous’ ‘obsequies and panegyrics’ to the ‘virtue, genius, and charm’ of their ‘ambrosial essence’. But the real stroke of genius lies in what some might call arbitrary pairings of words. How would a man of ordinary intelligence complete the phrase ‘an orgy of X’? Assuredly not with the word ‘lying’. But as a Prepositional Phrase, ‘orgy of lying’ is perfection itself.

But let us not spend too long on mere phrases. Grenville Kleiser has more in store for us. In Literary Expressions we find these gems:

• A broad, complacent, admiring imbecility breathed from his nose and lips
• A little jaded by gastronomical exertions
• How sweet and reasonable the pale shadows of those who smile from some dim corner of our memories
• Oppressed with a confused sense of cumbrous material
• The sky grew ensaffroned with the indescribable hue that heralds day
• Wrapt in his odorous and many-colored robe

As if those delights were not enough to give pleasure to all, behold the following Striking Similes:

• A book that rends and tears like a broken saw
• A breath of melancholy made itself felt like a chill and sudden gust from some unknown sea
• A giant galleon overhead, looked like some misty monster of the deep
• Faces pale with bliss, like evening stars
• Gone like tenants that quit without warning
• She flounders like a huge conger-eel in an ocean of dingy morality
• Those ancestral themes past which so many generations have slept like sea-going winds over pastures

Amazingly enough, Grenville Kleiser is not more widely known. But I hope that oversight will be addressed as soon as possible.