A lagniappe is a bonus, a gift, a freebie. It’s a kind of reverse gratuity which the customer receives rather than bestows, similar to the tradition of the baker’s dozen, whereby a customer gets thirteen items after having paid for twelve. Lagniappe arose as the Louisiana French spelling of the the American Spanish phrase la napa, meaning the bonus. The Spanish, in turn, may have acquired the word from Quechua, the language of the ancient Incas, still spoken by ten million people in South America. In that language, the word yapa means gift, which might easily have been misconstrued by Spanish conquistadors as napa. In English, lagniappe first appeared in 1849, but it continues to be a regional word, confined mostly to the Gulf states. The Internet Yellow Pages, for example, reveals that thirty-eight businesses in Louisiana have lagniappe in their names, from Lagniappe Catering to Lagniappe Custom Tattoos; in California there are only two “Lagniappe” businesses, and in Minnesota there are none. Even further north, the word lagniappe was excluded in 1996 from the Canadian version of an American dictionary, on the grounds that the word was not known in Canada.