Goldbrick vs Null - What's the difference?
goldbrick | null |
A gold brick, especially one that is fraudulent or nonexistent; a swindle, a con.
* 1920 , , (The Smart Set),'' January 1920, collected in ''(Tales of the Jazz Age):
*:Experience is the biggest gold brick in the world. All older people have it for sale.
* 1932 , , Memoirs Of A Soldier Of Fortune , Kessinger Publishing (2006), ISBN 9781428658349,
* 1932 , in , Volume 166, page 520:
* 1945 , in the Department of Agriculture and Immigration Bulletin , Volumes 422–433, page 5:
* , quoted in Lewis M. Dabney, Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature ,
(US slang, dated) A shirker or malingerer
* 1945 , Dr. Charley Haly, quoted in Doc: heroic stories of medics, corpsmen, and surgeons in combat by Mark R. Littleton,
*:Mac, there’s not a confounded thing wrong with you. You are an excellent physical specimen and in good health. You’re nothing but a goldbrick . Now, get your butt out of here and don’t ever come back again unless you’re really sick or need an immunization.
* 2004 (written ), (Howard Ashman), , “Proud of your Boy”:
*:Tell me that I’ve been a louse and loafer
*:You won’t get a fight here, no ma’am
*:Say I’m a goldbrick, a good-off, no good
*:But that couldn’t be all that I am
(US slang, dated) A swindler
(US slang, dated) To shirk or malinger
(US slang, dated) To swindle
A non-existent or empty value or set of values.
Zero]] quantity of [[expression, expressions; nothing.
Something that has no force or meaning.
(computing) the ASCII or Unicode character (), represented by a zero value, that indicates no character and is sometimes used as a string terminator.
(computing) the attribute of an entity that has no valid value.
One of the beads in nulled work.
(statistics) null hypothesis
Having no validity, "null and void"
insignificant
* 1924 , Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove :
absent or non-existent
(mathematics) of the null set
(mathematics) of or comprising a value of precisely zero
(genetics, of a mutation) causing a complete loss of gene function, amorphic.
As nouns the difference between goldbrick and null
is that goldbrick is a gold brick, especially one that is fraudulent or nonexistent; a swindle, a con while null is zero, nil; the cardinal number before einn.As a verb goldbrick
is (us slang|dated) to shirk or malinger.goldbrick
English
Alternative forms
* gold-brickNoun
(en noun)page 98:
- These, as a rule, were not adverse to buying a goldbrick as long as they knew that there was a chance for them to dump it on somebody else afterwards with some profit.
- To-day, American attitude toward Europe is comparable to that of the country greenhorn who, having bought a goldbrick on Broadway, now fills the air not merely with the denunciation of the sharpers who tricked his credulity —
- The average farmer may be less of a victim than some other people by reason of his isolation, conservatism, and hard earned money, but he, too, has too often bought a goldbrick that did not materialize.
][http://www.amazon.com/Edmund-Wilson-Literature-Lewis-Dabney/dp/0374113122Macmillan (2005), ISBN 9780374113124, page 485:
p. 68
Verb
Derived terms
* goldbrickerReferences
null
English
Noun
(en noun)- (Francis Bacon)
- Since no date of birth was entered for the patient, his age is null .
Adjective
(en adjective)- In proportion as we descend the social scale our snobbishness fastens on to mere nothings which are perhaps no more null than the distinctions observed by the aristocracy, but, being more obscure, more peculiar to the individual, take us more by surprise.