Other than that, the whole process is not unique to Persians. Maybe they are extreme about it, but in Japan you can see pretty much the same kind of situations as the ones they described... while I must admit the taxi driver telling you the trip was "nothing at all" is rather amusing and unique.
I guess the loan word spread throughout the muslim world somehow...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farang#Etymology_and_related_w...
Sort of reminds me of an anecdote I read somewhere in a book about medieval fashion - one theory is that those curvy-toed shoes you see in late medieval artwork originated in Tang dynasty China, and the fashion took ~500 years to slowly make its way west across Eurasia.
Farsi is an indo-european language so beside loan words which infiltrated the language during Reza Shah's moderinization of Iran, many of them actually share the same root as other Indo-European languages like English, French or German.
Farangi is one of those words. It is not a borrowed word
The Proto-Indo-European root for "no" is *ne, so many (most?) IE languages feature this. e.g. no, non, nyet, nein, ne, na, ni, etc. There are languages from India to Ireland that have this sort of negation. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_loanwords_in_Pe...
[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Indo-European/...
Hence Tie is "Kerevaat" (fr. cravate), Elevator is "Asaansor" (fr. ascenseur) and Pineapple is "Anaanaas" (fr. ananas)