My Dendrology Is Trash

[00:05] Oh, we do under Google rules. That was the play of super excited told us we had to. We
[00:20] signed up for it. In the end, it's going to be better and more true than Google can give
[00:26] you. All right, so I was thinking of a term that I just have no idea what it means. It's
[00:34] an old chestnut. It's an old chestnut. Why are people keeping old nuts around? What is
[00:42] happening? I'm gonna tell you this about this old chestnut. So the old chestnut is the old
[00:52] chestnut. It's like a prize chestnut. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It was the pride of the family
[00:57] for generations. What if it's like a white elephant gift, which is just like, they just keep passing
[01:04] around the old chestnut. Yeah, yeah. And the idea of the of the chestnut is that it's like
[01:10] a it's like a story or wisdom. Yeah, right. It's a piece of bit of piece bit of wisdom. Yeah.
[01:18] But maybe like pull yourself up with the bootstraps. Originally, it was a white elephant that was
[01:23] meant to like, you know, mess with people. And eventually, it came to mean a tale of
[01:29] wisdom. Okay, I would just say that we did, we did a previous under Google Bowl on a nut.
[01:40] We did the what did we do in a nutshell, right? And that ended up being a walnut in like Roman
[01:50] times. So did they have chestnuts in Roman times? I want to say that chestnuts went go
[01:58] back along. Yeah, I don't know. It's like specifically New World or they Old World. I
[02:05] don't I mean, no, I don't either. My dendrology is trash. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire
[02:14] is that that's I feel like that goes back to like England, at least, if not Germany.
[02:20] Does it? Oh, yeah, the Germans are doing everything Christmas. We learned that Christmas
[02:26] is all from Germany. Right. I mean, it's it does seem like the sort of activity that could
[02:31] only be meaningful if there was no electricity. Right. Okay, so it's old chestnut. So who's
[02:44] it Andrew Jackson was old? Oh, he was old. You think there? Do you think there was a person
[02:51] named Old Chestnut? That's not a bad idea. Dimes of wisdom all the time. Yeah, I mean,
[02:59] Lincoln was the old chestnut. Ben Franklin was the old chestnut. What is what what tree
[03:11] does a chestnut come from? A chestnut tree. That's not a thing. Sure, it is. It is indeed.
[03:20] All right. There's a chestnut tree. Yep. What does it look like? It's tall. It's got branches.
[03:29] It's a tree. Looks like a tree. Oh, yeah, no, you're right. No, if you got it. Yeah, you're
[03:36] right. Yeah. If you get a chestnut cabinet. Sure. Okay. All right. Fair enough. Yeah. All
[03:41] right. So are they even nuts then? Is it just a chestnut tree? Yes. Okay. Yeah. There's
[03:48] a season tree gives you the chestnut. We're roasting on an open fire. Okay. All right. I'm
[03:55] going to commend all of us for not doing this Snoop Dogge joke so far. We're a long way from
[04:04] home, buddy. That's right. Yeah, exactly. There's still time. I was waiting for that for the big
[04:14] finale. This old chestnut. So when do we think people started using the phrase? Well, people
[04:23] started using chestnut wood long before the phrase, probably. People were carving
[04:32] chestnut trees into things and they were probably roasting chestnuts before people could even speak.
[04:39] Who sang the old Christmas song famous? Was it like Bing Crosby or something like chestnuts?
[04:45] I think it's a Bing Crosby. I assumed that that's when the phrase came about. That's
[04:50] as far back as I could imagine. That's of course not true. Right. But it also doesn't relate to
[04:57] it being a bit of wisdom because if you're roasting that bit of wisdom, it's not great.
[05:06] And there's so many bits of wisdom. I feel like this is a long walk to a Snoop Dogge joke.
[05:20] Maybe does it come from the idea that the tree has been around for so long and it's seen so much
[05:27] that that's where the wisdom part of it comes from, a wise little tree kind of thing?
[05:32] Yeah. What about passing around the conch shell or whatever? Maybe it's your time to speak and they
[05:39] would pass somebody the old chestnut. Maybe less passing the chestnut that's on fire. Maybe just
[05:47] like it is a time to sit around and share your list. I sure don't fight. I love how he's made it
[05:54] on fire. The chestnut's constantly flaming in Harper's mind. That's the first piece of wisdom is
[06:07] don't touch the flaming chestnut. I mean, that's age-old. This is the original version of hot potato.
[06:14] That's right. That's Harper's old chestnut. Don't touch the chestnut. That's a tough one.
[06:27] I just don't know how far. Because if it goes back to Roman times,
[06:33] we just talk about some Roman philosopher or it's 1950s Ben Crosby. I don't know. It could be either
[06:40] one of those things. I do like your idea that it might be a political rally like an old hickory.
[06:46] Old kinder hook. Old chestnut. Yeah, exactly. A lot of old guys. That's definitely true of
[06:52] American politics. Somebody was dropping wisdom all the time and we like to put old in front of us.
[06:59] You lost me there. American politics and wisdom. Yeah, that's where I had to get off.
[07:03] People thought they wanted to pretend they were wise by creating the phrase old chestnut.
[07:10] Yeah, I'm going to guess maybe it goes back to Europe and 1700s or something. I get the
[07:22] impression that people aren't sitting around telling stories around the fire
[07:28] once there are maybe pre-Gutenburg press. Maybe that's when it ended.
[07:37] Sure. Before people are forced to work in the Australian Revolution.
[07:44] Okay, so it's either Germany's connected to Christmas. I'm going with 1820s
[07:55] and some sort of political rally. In America. In America.
[08:02] So that would literally be like rivaling Andrew Jackson. It would be like Andrew Jackson was
[08:07] old hickory and his opponent was old chestnut, old hickory going at it. That's what I'm saying.
[08:11] Mono e mono. That's how you fight fire with fire. The flaming chestnut.
[08:19] Yeah, I like that. I feel like it feels like almost like frontiers-y America.
[08:37] Like 1830s America. And it just referred to chestnut trees living a long time or something.
[08:50] And old chestnut trees that were wise somehow. Or bookcases were made out of chestnut wood.
[08:58] And they contained the wisdom of the ages. Well, in a nutshell, they wrote actual like
[09:06] the Iliad inside the walnut. Maybe we did the same thing with chestnuts. We just put
[09:11] a bunch of wisdom in there. Maybe Mark Twain was putting his stuff in chestnuts.
[09:17] Well, we got some disagreement on this one. We're kind of all over the map.
[09:22] No, I meant us as a group, not the answer. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay, good.
[09:28] According to Wiktionaries popularized in the 1880s, particularly in the northeast and
[09:35] Midwest with various theories propounded. So it seems like we are in agreement with
[09:43] the general etymological historians. A commonly cited theory viewed by the Oxford English
[09:52] dictionary as quote unquote plausible and cited by brewers is that it was coined by Boston comedic
[09:59] actor William Warren Jr. quoting from 1816 English melodrama The Broken Sword by William Diamond.
[10:08] One of the characters in the play is a boar. And when in when once recounting a tale mentions
[10:15] a court tree, which is corrected by the character Pablo as a chestnut. I have heard you tell this
[10:21] tale 27 times. Oh, I like that. This line was then apparently quoted at dinner by Warren,
[10:30] the comedian, the Boston comedic actor, in response to a boar there and proved popular.
[10:38] So there's a tree called the American chestnut, which once dominated portions of the eastern US
[10:45] forests, numbering as many as 4 billion in number, the tree was among the tallest,
[10:50] largest and fastest growing. So apparently, at the turn of the 20th century, there was a deadly
[10:58] blight, which came over from Asia, which killed all our American chestnuts, there's been no new
[11:05] chestnut lumber sold in the US for decades. And the bulk of the 20 million pound annual nut crop
[11:12] now comes from introduced European or Asian chestnut species, or from nuts imported from Italy or
[11:18] Turkey. Really? I mean, that's according to the American Chestnut Foundation. And if they're going
[11:25] to gaslight me, we got problems. They're just looking for handouts.
[11:31] We have been losing chestnut jobs to the Europeans for decades now. Centuries.
[11:40] So the phrase old chestnut definitely means old chestnut because we don't even have chestnuts
[11:44] anymore. Well, we don't we don't have American chestnuts. So 1816, just an offhanded line from
[11:53] a play that became very popular. Apparently, there's a phrase called a hoary chestnut.
[12:01] I was going to say, don't don't tell Snoop Dogg about that.
[12:07] And here, the old chestnut or the hoary chestnut, it means that it's a story that's been repeated so
[12:15] often that is no longer interesting, which is more like the play, but different than our
[12:23] understanding of it being a bit of wisdom. Yeah. But I mean, I guess bits of wisdom are
[12:28] repeated so often that they no longer become useful. Righty tighty, lefty loosey. I don't know.
[12:37] That's an old chestnut. Still useful, though. Yeah, it seems. I'm seeing
[12:48] the broken sword seems to be the origin. Has anyone ever had a roasted chestnut?
[12:55] No, I had actually. So how was it? I was. They're not.
[13:04] Where was I? I was in Strasbourg, which is like in France, but right on the border. Yeah.
[13:11] It's like a base. Yeah. Yeah. It's like I think it's going back and forth between
[13:18] those different empires, I guess, over the years. But yeah. And so I was there around
[13:24] Christmas time, and so they have a Christmas market in downtown and they definitely had
[13:29] they have all the horrible things. They have mulled wine and
[13:32] roasted chestnuts that you can buy and try in there. Awesome. Grocery from hell.
[13:40] Yeah. All right. Well, even urban dictionary is much more tame than I thought they were going to be.
[13:47] So more tame than I was going to be.