Damn, that was a miss on my part!! Seemed like an obvious back-borrow since there are dozens (hundreds?) in Japanese. Not just English, but most people don’t realize that Japanese “Tempura” is back-borrowed from Portuguese (that is Portuguese -> Japanese -> English).
I had a food-nerd roommate in college, mid-nineties, who introduced me to it. He always liked to say, “Oooh, mommy!” in this lascivious voice. Such a nerd. I miss that dude.
Because the Philippines was a Spanish colony for many years before it became an American colony as spoils of the Spanish-American war. Interestingly, many Filipinos don’t recognize the Spanish loan words they use. I learned a little Tagalog when I had a Filipina girlfriend. “Glass of water” in Tagalog is “baso ng tubig” with the baso almost certainly on loan from the Spanish vaso for glass. Another time a group of us were sitting around eating corn on the cob and one of them asked me “Do you know how to say corn in Filipino?” “Maiz.” I said. It was a total guess, but they were all surprised at how much Tagalog I’d learned. It was interesting that even those of them who could speak Spanish didn’t recognize the Spanish loan words.
Not familiar with that last one in that context - I’ve always understood “mook” to be a synonym for “goons” or “henchmen”, particularly in a video game, movie, or TV show.
Does “Quinoa” count? I know it’s a food that’s been around a long time but I don’t recall it being a common thing in English until five years ago or so.
“Ramen”. Back in the 90’s, most people I knew referred to Ramen as “Cup Noodles” (the brand), since their only exposure to the dish was the instant make-at-home variety.
These days along with the proliferation of Ramen restaurants, I see the term being used with more frequency.
I also vote for “emoji”. It’s very familar with people under 30, its not just a back borrowing of english and its ubiquitous to the point that Apple OS X has “emoji & symbols” on every programs edit menu.
I don’t know how long it lasted but in the UK using the slang “poonany” (which has similar origins to the US term poontang) for female genitalia went from an obscure west indian term, to fairly mainstream slang after Ali G popularized it in the early 2000s.
Google’s Ngram viewer shows it was used in books at least since the mid-1800s, and was not infrequent in the 1930s. While it certainly has become more popular since the early 1900s, I don’t think it can be counted as a word that has been borrowed recently.
Certainly, by the early-mid-90s, ramen as a word was pretty much ubiquitous around here. (That’s when I went to college, 1993-1998). It was usually of the Maruchan plastic-wrapped variety, but also the cup variety. The something you’d order at a restaurant or have a restaurant dedicated to variety, though was not known. It was just cheap college student food usually sold for something like 5 or so for a buck. Pretty much everyone I knew, though, called it ramen. I personally have never heard the phrase, to my knowledge, “cup noodles.”
