Long before bubble tea, the Tupi people of Brazil's coast called the starch that settles out of squeezed cassava tipi'óka, roughly 'sediment'. Portuguese settlers took up the word after 1500, and cassava itself is native to Brazil.
📍 Maritime Canada & Maine
Not Alpine at all: toboggan reached English in 1829 through Canadian French tabagane, from an Algonquian word for a sled, such as Mi'kmaq topaghan. These flat wooden sleds hauled loads across the snow.
📍 Tokyo (Edo), Japan
Tycoon is Japanese taikun, 'great lord', a title foreigners used for Japan's shogun in the 1850s. Lincoln's secretary called him 'the Tycoon' in 1861; the business-mogul sense came after WWI.
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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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📍 Coastal mountains of southeast Brazil
The Christmas cactus is no desert plant: its wild Schlumbergera ancestors grow on trees and rocks in the misty coastal mountains of southeast Brazil, where they're called flor de maio, 'May flower', as they bloom in the southern autumn.
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📍 Buenos Aires, Argentina
The first feature-length cartoon wasn't Snow White (1937) but El Apóstol, made in Buenos Aires in 1917 by Quirino Cristiani from 58,000 frames of cut-out animation. Its only copy was lost in a 1926 studio fire.
📍 South America (Brazil & neighbours)
Bougainvillea, the flower of Mediterranean balconies, is a South American native that grows wild from Brazil to Peru and Argentina. It is named after French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, whose expedition recorded it.