Chestnut is a British slang term for an old joke, often as old chestnut.
The term is also used for a piece of music in the repertoire that has grown stale or hackneyed with too much repetition.
A plausible explanation for the term given by the ''
Oxford English Dictionary
The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the first and foundational historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a com ...
'' is that it originates from a play named ''The Broken Sword'' by
William Dimond
William Fisher Peach Dimond (11 December 1781 – c1837) was a playwright of the early 19th-century who wrote about thirty works for the theatre, including plays, operas, musical entertainments and melodramas.
Life
He was born in Bath in Som ...
,
World Wide Words: "Chestnut"
/ref> in which one character keeps repeating the same stories, one of them about a cork tree Cork tree or corktree may refer to:
* Cork oak, ''Quercus suber'', the tree from which most cork is harvested
* Chinese cork oak, ''Quercus variabilis'', a tree from which cork is occasionally harvested
* Cork-tree, a species of ''Phellodendron''
*' ...
, and is interrupted each time by another character who says: ''Chestnut, you mean ... I have heard you tell the joke twenty-seven times and I am sure it was a chestnut''. The play was first performed in 1816, but the term did not come into widespread usage until the 1880s.
See also
* old chestnut in Wiktionary
References
External links
Broken Sword text
at Archive.org
The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...
Humour
Jokes
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