Word To Use Today: chestnut.

 So, what's so chesty about chestnuts?

Absolutely nothing at all. Well, you can keep them in chests if you want to, but that's nothing to do with the name.

Most of us come across chestnuts in one form or other, and they're traditional to a Northern Christmas. There are the kind that grow on trees and you can eat; the kind that grows on trees and you can't eat, like horse chestnuts (although some people have said they can cure breathing difficulties in horses).

(By the way, a horse's chestnut is a callous on its leg:

photo by Zeppo 1

It's believed to be a vestigial toe.)

There are also chestnuts which don't grow on trees, such as the water chestnut. In Britain these are found exclusively in tins, but in the East they are the corms of a tall marsh grass.

The chestnuts we eat in Britain at Christmas are best fresh, but we have special old chestnuts, too, often found inside our Christmas crackers. This kind of chestnut is very old, groan-worthy joke. Ancient anecdotes can be called old chestnuts, too.

Wherever you are in the world, this kind of chestnut is surely a midwinter - or midsummer - tradition.

Word To Use Today: chestnut. This word used to be chesten, and before that chasteine, from the Old French chastain. Before that was the Latin castanea and the Greek kastaneia. The Greeks thought this name came about because the trees originated in either Castanea or Castana, but there's an Armenian word kask which suggests that the word came from that direction.

The old chestnut, meaning an old story or joke, might come from the 1816 American melodrama The Broken Sword by William Dimond, which contains this piece of dialogue:

Zavior: At the dawn of the fourth day's journey, I entered the wood of Collares, when, suddenly from the thick boughs of a cork-tree—

Pablo: [Jumping up.] A chesnut, Captain, a chesnut!

Zavior: Bah! you booby, I say, a cork.

Pablo: And I swear, a chesnut—Captain! this is the twenty-seventh time I have heard you relate this story, and you invariably said, a chesnut, till now.

**

The actor Joseph Jefferson claimed the actor and comedian William Warren, who played Pablo, popularised the expression.