The Great English Muffin Shift

The Americans and British are separated by a common language. This has been attributed to Churchill, Shaw, and Wilde, all of whom stole from the best, but has never been attributed to Mencken, who should have said it but said other things instead.

There's the differences in pronunciation (Americans pronounce all 'r's, and Brits take a royal 'bahth'), and grammar (Americans go to the hospital, and Brits go to hospital), and there's all sorts of vocabulary differences, lorries and lifts and petrol.

But one primary difference is in vocabulary of food. Zucchini/courgette, eggplant/aubergine, let's call the whole thing off.  A number of baked bread products have different names in the two varieties. What's so special is that they form a chain, as though some higher force pushed in a word at one end of the sausage machine, forcing all the little sausages to move one sausage over, a Great English Muffin Shift. It goes like this:

A cookie in the US is a biscuit in the UK and
biscuit...scone and
muffin...scone, a slightly different kind of scone and
muffin fairy cake, a slightly different kind of muffin and
English muffin...crumpet, because in the UK, you're there already you don't need to specify English.

What 'cookie' means to Brits, and 'crumpet' to Americans, I don't know. Yes, the sausage machine seems to go in reverse there and then start forward again, sometimes the machinery gets stuck.

There's also the Great Fried Potato Migration: what are called 'fries' in the US are called 'chips' in the UK, and 'chips' in the US are called 'crisps' in the UK.

As far as I can tell 'crisps' means nothing to an American beyond you must be talking about something crispy but why would you call it that directly. And 'fries' to a Brit must elicit a 'Pardon me, but fried what?'