It is not official, but they say that when Captain Cook made the first recorded contact with Australia he saw a kangaroo and asked the aborigines what it was. They answered gangurru, which in their language means “I don’t understand you” and since then the kangaroo is called kangaroo.

Something very similar happened on the northeast coast of Yucatan in 1517 although there are several versions. The most accepted, since there is a written record, is the one told by Alonso de Zorita, who takes the story from the writings of Friar Toribio Benavente and López de Gomara.

He says that Francisco Hernández de Córdoba, Cristóbal Morante and Lope Ochoa de Cayzedo left Havana, traveled west and “arrived at a land unknown before and a little further on they found some people and asked them what the name of that land was. They answered uh yu ka tꞌaan, which means ‘look how they talk!’ The Spaniards thought that was the name and over time the word was transformed, becoming Yucatán.”