Gotrocks

[Jonathan Lighter]

In HDAS, but Arnold's antedating is by a full generation.

  However, the name is older still:

  1904  F. G. Tyrrell _Brimstone Bargains in the Marriage Market_ (St. Louis: Puritan Publishing Co.) 60: How they may entrap the "rich young Gotrox."

  1906 [Henry Frederic Reddall] _Wit & Humor of the Physician_ (Phila.: George W. Jacobs) 184: " Well, Drs. Brown and Smith are going to operate upon old Gotrox." " Is the operation necessary ? " " Why, yes; Brown has a note coming due, and Smith wants an automobile."

  Google Books includes several more from the magazine _Judge's Library_, one of which alludes to the Rough Riders as a recent phenomenon, but there's no way to date the "snippets."  Every issue of _Judge's Library_ is dated by Google to "1892, but this is clearly absurd.

  JL

"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
Subject: Gotrocks
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Gael Greene, Insatiable (2006), p. 310, at the then very fashionable
restaurant 150 Wooster Street in 1989:

Never mind the scattering of Gwathmeys, filmmaker Joan Micklin
Silver, Ian Schrager with his niece and Steve Rubell's nephew, plus
the usual art-world suspects, the assorted Lady Gotrocks.

-----

any information on the history of the invented name Gotrocks to refer
to someone with a hell of a lot of money? most often a woman -- Mrs.
Gotrocks, or Lady Gotrocks in Greene's memoir -- but not always:

To understand how this toll has ballooned, imagine for a moment that
all American corporations are, and always will be, owned by a single
family. We'll call them the Gotrocks.
(Warren Buffett, 2005 letter to shareholders)

Mr. Hoving disagreed vigorously, saying, ''J. Richardson Gotrocks 3d
is paying for art, and we want him to keep paying.'' He cautioned
against ''messing around with the system.''
(NYT article of 6/16/83 on tax law aiding the arts)

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the earliest hit in the NYT archives is from 1910:

Finally they were made to see that it was a lesson in democracy and
equality in our public school system. It was better, they were shown,
to have little Miss Gotrocks appear in a dress not quite fine enough
than to have her seat-mate, little Miss Nocash, cry her eyes out
because her father couldn't afford to dress her as well as Miss
Gotrocks on the great day of their school life.
(NYT article of 5/29/1910, "Children Make Their Own Graduation
Dresses")

then there's a 30-year Gotrocks gap in the archives. in 1941 Bosley
Crowther bursts onto the Gotrocks scene in a review; more Crowther
reviews follow in 1943, 1944, 1948, 1951, and 1966. all in all, 28
NYT hits for "Gotrocks".

arnold

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