Where have all the Goldstone bosons gone?

According to a commonly held view of spontaneously broken symmetry in gauge theories, troublesome Nambu-Goldstone bosons are effectively eliminated by turning into longitudinal modes of a massive vector meson. This note shows that, this is not in fact, a consistent view of the role of Nambu-Goldstone bosons in such theories. These particles necessarily appear as gauge excitations, whenever they are formulated in a manifestly covariant gauge. The radiation gauge provides therefore the dual advantage of circumventing the Goldstone theorem and making evident the disappearance of these particles from the physical spectrum.