When the Scotsmen who had been sent to Ireland (by and large, to keep their raiding parties the Hell out of England -- let the bandits in kilts beat up on the barbarians in Ulster, eh?), ended up going to America in the early 18th Century, "Scotch" was a perfectly appropriate way in British English (on BOTH sides of the border marches, and in Ulster) to refer to a Scottish person.
Read Robert Burns, for instance. Note that English lexigraphers and historians were using "Scotch" well into the 20th Century.
The British usage dropped "Scotch" as a term for Scottish culture, persons, or ancestry (aside from whisky), but the people on the other side of that rather large water obstacle kept the ORIGINAL Scottish and English usage far longer, continuing to refer to their heritage the way their ancestors did when they arrived here -- traditional English "Scotch-Irish" vs. the new-fangled Britishism of "Ulster Scots".
MANY of the so-called "Americanisms" (especially spelling -- spelling was still not standardized at the time of British recognition of American independence) are actually archaic Britishisms that survived in America longer than the UK; or they refer to terminology for things that that just weren;t in common use (or many times, even invented) at the time of American independence.
When the Scotsmen who had been sent to Ireland (by and large, to keep their raiding parties the Hell out of England -- let the bandits in kilts beat up on the barbarians in Ulster, eh?), ended up going to America in the early 18th Century, "Scotch" was a perfectly appropriate way in British English (on BOTH sides of the border marches, and in Ulster) to refer to a Scottish person.
Read Robert Burns, for instance. Note that English lexigraphers and historians were using "Scotch" well into the 20th Century.
The British usage dropped "Scotch" as a term for Scottish culture, persons, or ancestry (aside from whisky), but the people on the other side of that rather large water obstacle kept the ORIGINAL Scottish and English usage far longer, continuing to refer to their heritage the way their ancestors did when they arrived here -- traditional English "Scotch-Irish" vs. the new-fangled Britishism of "Ulster Scots".
MANY of the so-called "Americanisms" (especially spelling -- spelling was still not standardized at the time of British recognition of American independence) are actually archaic Britishisms that survived in America longer than the UK; or they refer to terminology for things that that just weren;t in common use (or many times, even invented) at the time of American independence.