Spell is an interesting example. Having lived abroad for a while now and watching the way English gets adapted into Japanese, I fired from the hip with my comment yesterday. Having read your comment thread and thinking about it a little more, the need to speak in codes would definitely promote an intentional affiliation of deifferent meanings to certain words, as you said *eye* and *I*. On a large scale, though, I think the way words are adopted into mainstream language from different regions and small groups depends a lot on chance. So, even if there is intention at some point, eventually, I think that largely loses out in the end to luck and chance. 

So many words in Japanese these days, like English, come from French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, etc. and in many cases, because they are written with specific characters, people here assume they're origins are English. I often get asked what such and such a word means and I have no idea because it's actually not an English word.