A sucker for a really good definition
"Lagniappe" was how my colleague described the acoustic Hey Ya video he was forwarding. Both the video and the meaning were better than I expected.
Bartleby gave the American Heritage definition: "Chiefly Southern Louisiana & Mississippi 1. A small gift presented by a storeowner to a customer with the customer's purchase…. Lagniappe derives from New World Spanish la ñapa, 'the gift,' and ultimately from Quechua yapay, 'to give more.' The word came into the rich Creole dialect mixture of New Orleans…."
In Wikipedia, we hear the word "was also once in common usage by antiquarian booksellers, without regional limitation, and is still used by more old-fashioned members of that tribe." Down further, we learn Mark Twain called it "a word worth travelling to New Orleans to get."
