Talk:goldbrick

RFV discussion
"An ingot of gold". No doubt that's the origin of the word, but when written without the space does it ever have this meaning? Equinox ◑ 13:33, 29 August 2010 (UTC)


 * I've added four cites referring to fake or nonexistent gold bricks (as opposed to our other senses, which denote persons). There seems to be a blurry range of uses. As I say, all four are referring to swindles, but only two clearly presuppose that the word "goldbrick" means a swindler's goldbrick; a third is ambiguous, IMHO leaving it to the reader to recognize that true gold bricks are not sold on Broadway, but not necessarily assuming the reader will recognize that true gold bricks are not "goldbricks"; and a fourth clearly thinks that a true gold brick is a "goldbrick", else its phrasing "goldbrick that did not materialize" would be so redundant as to be nonsensical. ("He paid a swindler for a nonexistent gold brick, but then — get this — he never actually received the nonexistent gold brick he'd paid the swindler for!") —Ruakh TALK 14:19, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

RFV passed, but rewritten per my above comment. —Ruakh TALK 02:13, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Dated
I’ve marked this term (in the senses “swindle” and “shirk”) as “dated”. I was born in the 1970s, and have never heard the term used as a verb, nor in the sense “a swindle”, and have only heard it used in the sense “shirker” once, by a woman born in the 1910s (in the early 1980s, she was around 70 at the time).

Perhaps it’s used in certain contexts, but I don’t think it’s generally used or understood – the first book ref I found (after dictionaries and actual gold bricks) was a quote from 1945, in WWII context.

Does this accord with others’ experiences?
 * —Nils von Barth (nbarth) (talk) 07:58, 9 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Yes, I've never heard it. Possibly seen in literature somewhere... Equinox ◑ 23:50, 29 July 2020 (UTC)