| 词汇 | old chestnut |
| 词源 | old chestnut. English playwright William Dimond’s melo- drama The Broken Sword (1816) is all but forgotten, along with its characters, plot, and dialogue, and the author himself isn’t remembered in most guides to literature. Yet Dimond had found immortality of sorts in the expression an old chestnut, “a stale joke or story,” which probably derives from an incident in his play. The Broken Sword’s principal character is crusty old Captain Xavier, who is forever spinning the same yarns about his highly unlikely experiences. He begins to tell the following one to Pablo, another comic character: Captain Xavier: I entered the woods of Golloway, when suddenly from the thick boughs of a cork tree— Pablo: A chestnut, Captain, a chestnut! Captain Xavier: Bah, I tell you it was a cork tree. Pablo: A chestnut; I guess I ought to know, for haven’t I heard you tell this story twenty-seven times? Fame didn’t come immediately. The lines lay at rest in Dimond’s play for almost 70 years before American actor William War- ren, Jr. repeated them at a stage testimonial dinner in Boston, after hearing another speaker tell a stale joke. Other actors present adopted Warren’s chestnut, elaborated on it, and it be- came the timeworn old chestnut. |
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