loan has the explicit give back property. thats what a loan IS:

'borrowed' carries the same implications with a down-note on the giving back.

taken, adopted, brought in, co-opted... there's a thesaurus of choices which to my way of thinking do a better job of describing english's habit of .. adopting other languages words.

the key point is that gate-keeping in english doesn't work. we don't have the academie francais to police loanwords, and nobody gets to say loan or borrow words are bad, and that better ones exist: they are what they are.

I'm really just howling at the moon. (I wonder if howl and moon, in some sense are loan words from latin, or anglo saxon)

Well, I don't have any specific examples off the top of my head, but it's not that unusual for a loanword to disappear from the language it was borrowed from and then wind up reintroduced in some form to the original language.

Pho would be a good example. Its Viet Nam's adoption of "pot au feu" from the french, then back imported into French as Pho, along with everywhere else when the indochine community brought it along for the world.

And of course, British English has both pot au feu and pho.

I am told that Bistecca in Florentine, is the pre 1871 ununified italy, adopting "beef steak" from the english, and then exporting it as a speciality dish to the world as italian food went global.

howl is so clearly old English it's funny (well Middle English but I call it old because I am not a pedant or professional). Moon is also old English but it is related to other words from other languages and comes from some far off proto language. So moon doesn't give the same feeling of look at that old timey word that howl does.