“[In the] UK – we call it Autumn, from the French word ‘autompne’, and later, the Latin ‘autumnus’,” begins a now-infamous tweet from 2013. “[In the] US – WE CALL IT FALL BECAUSE LEAF FALL DOWN”. It’s undoubtedly funny, but is it true? Well, not quite. Why do Brits call fall “autumn”?First things first: the French word for that season is not autompne, but automne. The original tweeter presumably meant to write “Old French”, in which autompne, or perhaps autumpne, is indeed one potential source of the English word autumn. That said, it’s at most half the story. The Oxford English Dictionary put…