Golden youths that wanted gelding

• golden lads → Shakespeare, Cymbeline 4.2.237: “Golden lads and girls all must/ As chimney-sweepers come to dust” → in Warwickshire yellow dandelions in flower were called golden lads while white dandelions that had gone to seed were called chimney-sweepers

• gelding: (1) the act of castrating; (2) a castrated animal, especially a horse

• gelding: taxing (after the geld, a tax payed by landholders to the crown in late Anglo-Saxon and Norman England)

• gilding: coating with gold, or painting gold

• gilded youth (phrase) rich young people of fashion → the phrase originally referred to dandies who appeared in Paris in 1794 after the fall of the Jacobins and the end of the Terror → Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, Vol 3, Book 7, Chapter 2, "La Cabarus": "Behold also instead of the old grim Tappe-durs [brutal bodyguards] of Robespierre, what new street-groups are these? Young men habited not in black-shag Carmagnole spencer, but in superfine habit carré, or spencer with rectangular tail appended to it; 'square-tailed coat,' with elegant anti-guillotinish specialty of collar; 'the hair plaited at the temples,' and knotted back, long-flowing, in military wise: young men of what they call the Muscadin or Dandy species! Fréron, in his fondness, names them Jeunesse Dorée, Golden or Gilt Youth. They have come out, these Gilt Youths, in a kind of resuscitated state; they wear crape round the left arm, such of them as were Victims [of the Terror]. More, they carry clubs loaded with lead; in an angry manner: any Tappe-dur, or remnant of Jacobinism they may fall in with, shall fare the worse."