if one Ngrams the following:

[no - show]:eng_us_2012,[no - show]:eng_gb_2012

it becomes evident that "no-show" was originally a US phrase. It was one of the many phrases I had to get used to whilst working with US multinationals in the early eighties; along with "maintenance and repairs", "miscellaneous", "inventory", "payables" instead of the Brit "R&M","sundry","stock","creditors". And "labor" not "labour".

However my cringe moment came later in the eighties, when in a downunder business meeting I had to ask what "dzarvo" was.
('Strine = this afternoon)

"WAIT HERE UNTIL RED LIGHT SHOWS." Was this in the USA?

In my experience US usage of "show" differs slightly from UK.
"He never showed" vs "He never showed up"
"The chef was a no-show" vs "The chef went AWOL".

When adding -able to a verb, the meaning seems to include a passive element: fixable -> able to be fixed; doable -> able to be done, and so forth.
There are two exceptions : "variable" and "changeable", where the sense is either active OR passive -> the weather is variable = the weather varies vs the outcome is variable, depending on the input -> the outcome may be varied; changeable -> able to change / able to be changed.

Can anyone come up with any other verbs that have an "active" meaning when -able is added?

I guess it is 'Strine or Kiwi then. They do not seem to say 'an Hotel' here, though; so it's not generalized. And maybe it's just the newsreaders for emphasis in phrases such as 'an HHistoric win for John Key'.

Newsreaders where I am at the moment consistently say "an Historic", aspirating the 'H" quite clearly.

@AnWulf Thank you for this: it is refreshing to climb out of the latinate ruts of today's English.
That said, my understanding is that "pithy" stems from c 1520 not earlier?
And I seem to recall either Chaucer or Shakespeare using "siker" where we might use "certainly" today?

Hungarians who learn English "tend to avoid using the English passive voice" : believe me it does NOT make for plain and simple English.

http://www.acta.sapientia.ro/acta-philo/C2-2/philo22-9.pdf

One way of writing simple, plain English is to make the topic of the paragraph the subject of the sentence.

Thus :
Eggs. Eggs are eaten the world over. They are fried, boiled, scrambled, poached and eaten raw. They are considered highly nutritious, although somewhat high in cholesterol.

The above is more coherent and cohesive than the following version which jumps around more:

Eggs. People eat them the world over. They fry, boil, scramble and poach them and eat them raw. They consider them highly nutritious, although eggs are somewhat high in cholesterol.

@WW well-done! It is of necessity long and detailed because the usage is

Whilst Euro-languages are often similar to English, a common error for Chinese speakers is to insert "but" at the start of the main clause (where we might insert "still" somewhere).

http://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/%22Although%22_with_%22suiran%22_and_%22danshi%22

I might also confess my French doesn't run to "quoique+subj" either!

@red Unfortunately you are a thousand years too late my friend. In those days English was pronounced pretty much as spelt; however around the time when printing began, spellings fossilized but pronunciation continued to change. So today's spellings of older English words usually reflect an older pronunciation.

As for foreign words brought into in English, we tend to keep the foreign spelling too, although again we pronounce them our way.

Oddly, the spelling of pronunciation and pronounce do in fact reflect current pronunciation.
Spellings of words derived from Latin tend to vary according to whether they came via French or were borrowed direct.