Gilt and Gilded
Tricksy Twins
This morning, I asked the Pachyderm of Prodigious Memory to help me distinguish between ‘gilt’ and ‘gilded’. In his bibliographic wisdom, Hathi suggested that I begin by consulting a sales brochure, dated 1881, from a firm that sold copper weather vanes.
As befits an artifact of the Gilded Age, the booklet - which tips the stationer’s scales at eighty pages - made much use of ‘gilded’. Indeed, that word appears eighty times, and thus, on average, once per page. ‘Gilt’, however, shows up but once.
