transemacabre | Americanisms Which Aren't

My pet peeve is when our colonial cousins turn up their noses at a crass Americanism in the English language, which turns out to be anything but. Due to our history, a lot of terms that were once standard in Britain and/or Ireland were fossilized in America, like dragonflies in amber, while they were superseded or joined by different terms across Da Pond and in Canada (which for obvious reasons had a closer connection to Britain than America did). A lot of what you might call Americanisms didn't originate in America at all.

For the record, none of these words are Americanisms, although some of them may be STANDARD here rather than abroad. When settler mothers murmured these words into the ears of the newborn babies in the American colonies, they were repeating words taught to them by their *own* mothers back in England, Scotland, Ireland, etc.

Reliable: cited by the Oxford English Dictionary as in regular British use two centuries before America was even a thing.
Talented: Invented by the oh-so-British author Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
Influential: Invented by the equally British Roger North, who died in 1734.
Wait On: Used by Chaucer, Milton, and George Eliot in the sense of "to await", "to lie in wait for", etc.
Oftentimes: Banquo uses in in MacBeth. It appears in the King James Bible for fuck's sake.
Transportation: Very common in Renaissance era England, eventually superseded by "transport" according to OED.
Gotten: This one has been part of English about half as long as there's BEEN an English language. It's from the Old Norse geta. It is still used in a handful of English dialects.
Clever: Used by Alexander Pope in the sense of "nice, likeable".
Mad: As used to mean "angry", was used in Britain since the 1300s according to the OED.
Fall: As used to mean the season between summer and winter, "fall" derives from the Old English faellen, "to fall, to decay". You can't get much more Saxon than that. Replaced by the fancy French automne in British English.
To Learn: In the sense of "that'll learn ya!" has a grand heritage, coming from Old English læran, "to teach".
Leash: Although you may walk your dog on a lead, back in the 1300s your ancestors might've put a leash on *their* dogs, according to OED.