Guano comes from wanu, the Quechua word for dung used as fertiliser. The Inca strictly protected the seabirds nesting on islands off Peru, and in the 1800s ships carried their droppings around the world to fertilise farms.
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📍 Tonga
Captain Cook picked up 'taboo' in Tonga in 1777, when Tongan nobles he'd invited to dinner wouldn't eat because they were taboo: forbidden. Similar words exist across Polynesia, like Hawaiian kapu.
📍 Taranto, Italy
The name comes from Taranto in southern Italy, home of a wolf spider whose bite was popularly blamed for 'tarantism', a frenzy said to be cured by dancing. English later gave the name to big hairy American spiders.
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📍 Southern Luzon, Philippines
This all-American slang for the middle of nowhere is Tagalog: US soldiers in the Philippines in the early 20th century picked up bundok, 'mountain', and brought it home as 'the boondocks'.
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📍 Southern Bolivia & NW Argentina
Peanuts were domesticated in South America, most likely in southern Bolivia or northwestern Argentina, where the most wild-like varieties still grow. The oldest known remains, about 7,600 years old, come from Peru.
📍 Junín plateau (Lake Junín), Peru
Maca, a turnip-like root now sold worldwide as a powder, grows at 4,000 metres, where frost and wind defeat most crops. Until the late 1980s it was farmed only around Lake Junín in central Peru, where it is still roasted in earth pits.
📍 Western Amazon (Brazil, Peru & Colombia)
The neon tetra comes from dark blackwater streams of the western Amazon, where Brazil, Peru and Colombia meet. Most neons sold in the US are now farm-raised in Southeast Asia, and their glowing stripes fade to grey at night while they rest.