Mexico
23.0000°N -102.0000°W · Q96
4 English words in this atlas trace back to Mexico. It sits in Mexico.
British television named it for Mexico; American crowds had done it for years.
Broadcasts of the 1986 World Cup in Mexico gave the stunt its British name, and it stuck across the Commonwealth. In North America it is simply the wave, traced to college and professional games in the early 1980s.
The three-way gunfight everyone pictures is a hundred years younger than the phrase.
The expression appears in American English by about 1876, one of many nineteenth-century Americanisms using Mexican to mean inferior or makeshift, as in Mexican overdrive. The three-cornered gun standoff it now describes came from spaghetti westerns and especially from the 1990s and Reservoir Dogs. Earlier writers called that a three-cornered or triangular standoff.
The reverse of Texpat: the same ending, the opposite direction of travel.
Mexpat blends Mexico and expat and appears in print by 2007, in a guidebook aimed at young foreigners living in Mexico City. Unusually, it names the person by the country they moved to rather than the one they left. Estimates put around a million United States citizens in Mexico, the largest American population in any other country.
A gearbox setting named after a country that had nothing to do with it.
The phrase first appears in American truckers' slang, in a June 1949 column in the San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune, next to Mexican supercharger for a vented truck rig and Mexican side-loader for a shovel. Green's Dictionary of Slang files it under the attributive Mexican, the pattern behind Mexican breakfast and Mexican raise, in which the nationality marks a thing as makeshift or worth nothing. A popular story ties the term to drivers coasting the hills of the Carrera Panamericana, but that race was not first run until May 1950, after the phrase was already in print. Dictionaries record Georgia overdrive as an equivalent.