I WAS in something of a palaver last week. I couldn't spell 'palaver' and had to go through all the palaver of looking it up in the dictionary.

It is a fine word, much under-used. When Neil Herron used it in last Saturday's paper to dismiss John Prescott's regional assembly advertising campaign as "all fuss and palaver", it was palaver's first appearance in The Northern Echo's news pages since April 2003.

Having gone through the palaver of checking the spelling, I read palaver's many meanings - tedious or time-consuming business; confused talk or activity; hubbub. This led onto a person who palavers being a palaverer; one who palavers regularly is a palaverist, and what they palaver is palaverment.

Excellent. Palaver, it turns out, is derived from the Portuguese word 'palavra' meaning 'a word or a talk'. Portuguese traders in the 1700s had a 'palavra' when they were conversing with the confused natives of Guinea in Africa. English sailors picked up on this and brought palaver home with them in about 1771.

There is a lovely irony here about the arch-Eurosceptic Mr Herron expressing himself so well by using a word that has been integrated into the English language via Europe

The only other word that comes via Portuguese nautical slang into English appears to be 'fetish'. The Portuguese discovered that the Africans worshipped little items that they believed had magical and superstitious properties. The Portuguese word for 'charm or sorcery' is 'feitio' which the English imported as 'fetish'.

As England had come home from Portugal in a palaver over a disallowed goal, I've pointlessly wasted the many hours that would have been spent watching football looking for other Portuguese words in regular English use.

'Lambada', for instance, is Portuguese for the wavelike motion of a whip which lambada dancers are said to mimic. Samba was the new form of music created in Brazil when Portuguese music mixed with African rhythms early in the 20th century.

'Tank' is also of Portuguese origin. During the First World War, the British were developing a secret weapon which they called a 'landship'. Such a name, though, would have given the game away to the Germans, so they gave it the codename Water Container. However, they quickly realised it would be embarrassing to send a toilet into battle, and instead called it a 'mobile water tank'. This came from the Portuguese word 'tanque' which had been stolen from Portuguese India where a 'tnkh' is an artificial lake.

The best Portuguese word, though, is dodo. In 1505, the Portuguese were the first explorers to visit the island of Mauritius where they discovered a fat, fearless and flightless bird. To them, it looked so stupid that they called it 'doudo', which is Portuguese for "simpleton".

The Dutch settled on Mauritius. They cooked the stupid bird and because it tasted disgusting called it 'walgvogel' which translates as "disgusting bird". By 1693, the Dutch (and the cats and rats they brought with them) had eaten so many walgvogels that the walgvogel was extinct.

No one was particularly bothered until 1865 when Lewis Carroll from North Yorkshire wrote a birdlike character into Alice in Wonderland. He called it Dodo and suddenly in English the walgvogel was no longer as dead as a...