Fifteen Thousand, or, I'm Sold!

Greenville Kleiser is a man after my own heart. He is the author of a marvellous little book called "Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases", written in 1917, one of Project Gutenberg's more recent releases. A book of "useful phrases"! How wonderfully quaint!

In the Introduction, Kleiser laments:

Another example is afforded by the endemic use of "of sorts" which struck London while the writer was in that city a few years ago. Whence it came no one knew, but it was heard on every side. "She was a woman of sorts;" "he is a Tory of sorts;" "he had a religion of sorts;" "he was a critic of sorts."

While it originally meant "of different or various kinds," as hats of sorts; offices of sorts; cheeses of sorts, etc., it is now used disparagingly, and implies something of a kind that is not satisfactory, or of a character that is rather poor. This, as Shakespeare might have said, is "Sodden business! There's a stewed phrase indeed!"

At which I began to giggle ever so helplessly.

Scrolling down to sample some of the proffered "useful phrases", I hit upon the Vs -

vacant stupidity, vacillating obedience, vacuous ease, vagabondish spirit, vagrant wandering...

Then pairs in Ps:

penetrating and insidious, penned and planned, peppery and impetuous, pestilence and famine...

Phrases in Cs:

Cloaked in prim pretense, Clothed with the witchery of fiction, Clutch at the very heart of the usurping mediocrity

I am so sold!