Being “caught in the act” or “caught in the act” is perhaps a slightly curious expression, this very ancient way of saying is still used today to indicate someone who is caught in the act, has made a mistake or told a lie and has been exposed. In other words, the root of the expression lies in a pun which made the chestnut an epithet of “gaffe”a “being caught off guard”. The connection between the fruit and the symbolic expression derives from a linguistic phenomenon: in the past the word “brown” indicated not only the chestnut, but also a mistake, and by extension a fool or a linguistic stumble, especially in popular or informal speech.
For this reason the custom has established itself of speaking of someone caught in the act by defining him as “caught in his brown”, that is, in his chestnut. This transformation mechanism is not unique: just think of other sayings related to chestnuts, such as “remove the chestnuts from the fire” (i.e. doing a difficult job in place of someone else, taking advantage of it) or the literary use of the fruit as a metaphor in popular and cultured texts. In short, over time, the chestnut has become a fertile ground for proverbial images, so much so that the expression “to pluck” has survived to this day in common and immediate language as polyrhematic expressionthat is, when two or more conjoined words function as a single word, with their own independent meaning. It is curious to note that the word “brown” also survives in the verb “smarronare”, which today means saying or doing foolish things, making obvious mistakes. To say that someone has been “caught” means that they have been caught red-handed. Thus a simple autumn fruit becomes a clear and lively image to indicate the mistake or the fool, showing how the language, thanks to the speakers, transmits much deeper meanings than it seems at first sight.
