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Avocados are so ubiquitous as a staple of sports events and parties (at least, in the form of guacamole) that it's easy to forget that they are not native to the United States. Their widespread appeal here and around the world owes much to the efforts of committed botanists and businessmen at the turn of the 20th century. Avocados are actually native to Mexico and Central America, which is why they bear a name (āhuacatl) that derives from Nahuatl, a language spoken by the indigenous Nahua people of Mexico and El Salvador. The word āhuacatl in Nahuatl was indeed at one point used to mean the fruit of the avocado tree and, more slangily, testicle, presumably because of the fruit's shape; according to Nahuatl scholar Magnus Pharao Hansen, the word in the context of testicle carried a double meaning much like the word ball (or, more to the point, nut) does in English. Spanish conquerors had a difficult time with the glottals and fricatives of local languages such as Nahuatl, and so over time the names of native flora and fauna became simplified: coyotl became coyote, mizquitl turned into mesquite, and āhuacatl became aguacate but lost its double meaning in the process (and became more of a double entendre). Mōlli is in fact Nahuatl for sauce, which in a linguistic coincidence sounds much like the Spanish infinitive moler (meaning to grind). However, it's not totally accurate to say that guacamole means testicle sauce, because in becoming the Spanish word aguacate (further distorted to avocado in English), the original Nahuatl for avocado word lost its second, more vulgate meaning (i.e., testicle). This may seem to be splitting hairs, but the fact remains that even if pre-Columbian Nahua peoples might have ever had occasion to utter the phrase testicle sauce, they would likely not have called it guacamole; instead, they would have used some variant of the more common words cuitlapanaatetl or atetl (testes; rocks) and mōlli or chīllacuēchōlli (sauce). The word guacamole is part of Nahuatl as auacamulli, and there's no evidence, past or present, to suggest it was ever used to mean anything but avocados. Mesoamerican language specialist Dr. Frances Karttunen, who has written several books on the Nahuatl language, had this to add: In other words, guacamole could be translated as testicle sauce in exactly the same way football could translate to foot-testicle.
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