My local radio station has a program called Solid Gold in the mornings, with a real DJ, by that I mean someone who knows something about music, not just presenting blurbs for advertisers. This DJ doesn’t read from a script. He talks about the musicians and the music he’s playing and is old enough to have been around when most of the music first played on the radio. Solid Gold.

Which is quite a bit different from gold plate. Gold plate has a bright shine and draws attention to itself. Real gold is rather shy, stays hidden in the ground, waiting patiently for someone to search it out. It can trust in the fact that it is pure gold, it’s worth is acknowledged world wide. Gold plate parades around showing itself off, trying to pose as real. Just under the surface there’s no telling what. You can gold plate anything.

Not much real gold in the world these days. Lots of razzle-dazzle. If you could ever see them both side by side the difference would be obvious. But with solid gold still around, probably, but staying hidden for the most part (after all, it’s value isn’t affected by imitations), it might be hard to tell solid gold from gold plate. It’s worth asking though and better to know. You wouldn’t want to go around believing something had the value of solid gold when it was in reality just a shiny gold surface.