English borrows words from every language it touches. There are tens of thousands of words borrowed from European languages, but that’s just because of all the contact with them. Now that people can move around the world just a little more easily than months-long voyages or treks, English is continuing its borrowing ways, adopting additional words from more far-flung languages.
Here’s an example: “Sometimes I wonder what these ojeks do to their helmets to leave the visor all scratched up to the point of not being able to see through it.” And here’s another: “He does not want to ride just any old ojek.”
An “ojek” is both a bicycle used as a taxi or truck, as well as its rider. It’s a borrowed word, of course, and in this case it’s borrowed from Indonesian. English-speaking dictionaries are not great authorities on the derivations of Indonesian words, so all we know about “ojek” is that it’s the same word in Indonesian (Javanese too, for that matter), but we don’t know where it came from.
This isn’t to say that “ojek” is unique because English borrowed it from Indonesian. It’s just a recent addition to a pretty long list, including “orangutan,” “bamboo,” “batik,” “sarong,” “gingham,” “compound” (when it’s used to mean a small area with buildings), and “Mata Hari.”
Okay, “Mata Hari” was originally a name, but by now it’s entered the language as “a beautiful and seductive female spy.” It was originally the alias of Margaretha Geertruida MacLeod, a dancer from Holland who (maybe) was a spy during World War I. She probably got the name during the time she lived in the Dutch East Indies (1897-1902), where “matahari” meant “sun.” On the other hand, it might be based on Sanskrit instead, where “mata” means mother and “Hari” is the name of one of the gods.
Either way, the story of Mata Hari was made into at least four movies, starting in 1927, five stage musicals, a ballet, and an opera, and the name became so well known it’s now part of the language. In fact, maybe you can find the old live-action TV series Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp, which is about (I’m not making this up) a crew of chimpanzees who can talk and are spies. I mean, who can blend in like a chimpanzee, right? Anyway, one of the spy chimp characters wasnamed Mata Hairi (see what they did there?). Mata Hairi was played by a chimp named Debbie, and voiced by Joan Gerber, a voice actress who performed as animated and live action characters in countless productions. She was so versatile that she often voiced several different characters in a given show, including “all the children in a Japanese train wreck” for a version of Godzilla. I wonder if the train crashed because it ran over an ojek.
