banana [L16th] This word travelled to English through Portuguese and Spanish from Mande, a language group of West Africa, arriving in the 16th century. In the 20th century slang expressions began to appear. American people began to go bananas with excitement, anger, or frustration in the 1950s. The top banana, ‘the most important person in an organization’, derives from US theatrical slang. It referred to the comedian with top billing in a show, a use first recorded in 1953 from a US newspaper, which also mentions second and third bananas. People have been slipping on a banana skin or peel since the late 19th century. The banana republic, a small state, especially in central America, whose economy is almost entirely dependent on its fruit-exporting trade, was referred to as early as 1904.