Antedatings of "Goth" & "Gothic"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 3/29/06, Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> www.scathe.demon.co.uk/name.htm:
[...]
>
> In an interview with Steve Keaton from Sounds in February 1981, Abbo from
> UK Decay inadvertently named the goth movement: "he said 'it's gonna be a
> movement' and we're going nah, we'll be gone in six months. He said you've
> got to get a name for it, it's not dance or alternative or New Pop or
> mod... and I remember saying 'we're into the whole Gothic thing'... and we
> sat there laughing about how we should have gargoyle shaped records and
> only play churches. Course he put it all in the interview.. for six months
> everything went quiet then when the album came out everyone was asking
> 'what's this Gothic thing you're into?' And it's a total joke!"

The archive at <http://www.rocksbackpages.com/> has quite a lot of
articles from _Sounds_, but this one hasn't been added yet.


--Ben Zimmer

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org