I was serving as a "celebrity chef" at a recent fundraising event (despite my being neither a celebrity nor a chef). Suddenly one of my fellow c.c.'s (who actually WAS a celebrity) approached and asked why the device warming the scrumptious Coq au Vin he was serving was called a "chafing dish."

After all, he explained, there didn't seem to be any chafing (rubbing or wearing away) going on in his dish, which was probably a testament to his culinary talents. And there appeared to be no connection to the disgusting scarab beetle known as the "chafer," or to Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee, known as "the Chafer" to his college buddies.

My cooking colleague's question lit a fire under me, and, like a good chafing dish, I warmed up to it. (The delicacy I was serving up, by the way, was the Jeanne Kyff Homemade Chocolate Chip Cookie, based on my mother's recipe from the 1950s.)

Let's cut to the "chafe." Both "chafe," meaning "to rub," and "chafing," as in "chafing dish," derive from the Middle English word "chaufen," meaning "to warm."

So the original meaning of "chafe" was "to warm." A medieval cookbook, for instance, provided these instructions in 1440: "Chauf hit over the fyre." (That was the 15th Century equivalent of "Nuke it in the microwave.")

Soon "chafe" came to mean "to warm by rubbing," and it's easy to see how this notion extended to mean "to wear away by friction; abrade."

Eventually, "chafe" took on the metaphoric meaning of "to feel irritation or discontent," as in, "The celebrity chef chafed at the repeated requests for his secret recipe."

Speaking of recipes, another celebrity chef came by to ask me why butter or solid fat used in baking is called "shortening."

So, it's back to the 1400s, when a secondary meaning of "short" evolved to denote any edible substance that was flaky or crumbly, perhaps because such foods had short fibers. This meaning of "short" gave rise to the terms "shortcake" and "shortbread."

Because adding butter, oil or solid fat to pastry dough makes the baked product "short," that is, tender, crumbly and rich, these substances came to be called "shortening." The first recorded use of "shortening" in this sense appeared in an 1823 reference to "shortening, suet or butter, in cake, crust or bread."

So we three celebrity chefs stood there, like three men in a tub of shortening: a butcher, a baker and me, the candid shtick-maker.

Rob Kyff, a teacher and writer in West Hartford, Conn., invites your language sightings. Send your reports of misuse and abuse, as well as examples of good writing, via e-mail to Wordguy@aol.com or by regular mail to Rob Kyff, Creators Syndicate, 737 3rd Street, Hermosa Beach, CA 90254.