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Etymonline.com is one of my favorite websites. I had no idea it had a blog though - thanks for posting. I love the description of English as “Built from half-Frenchified Roman marble and local wattle-and-daub.”

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James Nicoll said, "English doesn’t borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar." For example, geyser (Icelandic), ski (Norwegian), mesa (Spanish), physics (Greek), pyjama (Persian), algebra (Arabic, along with the algorithms--and of course 'algorithm' comes from Arabic too), kayak (Greenland Inuit by way of Danish), canoe (Arawak by way of Spanish), banana (Wolof), coolie (probably from Tamil), hula (Hawai'ian), origami (Japanese), chimpanzee (probably from a Bantu language), alphabet(Canaanite by way of Greek), and...well, you get the idea. Also countless placenames, like Seattle (Salish).

Most of those words exist also in a number of European languages. Not a good example for the mixed nature of English that makes it stand out; pointing to its combination of inherited Germanic lexicon and French loans would be better.

Indeed, beware any popular treatments of the history of English, which might give you pithy quotations like the one you cite above, but have so often been sloppily written by non-experts.

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