shrimp, you

   ‘Shrimp’ has been applied contemptuously to small people since at least the fourteenth century.

   Chaucer uses the word in this way in his Monk’s Prologue, while Shakespeare has, in Henry the Sixth

   Part One (2:iii):

   I thought I should have seen some Hercules.

   A second Hector, for his grim aspect

   And large proportion of his strong-knit limbs.

   Alas, this is a child, a silly dwarf!

   It cannot be this weak and writhled shrimp

   Should strike such terror to his enemies.

   A less contemptuous comparison is made in Love’s Labour’s Lost (5:ii): ‘when he [Hercules] was a babe, a child, a shrimp/Thus did he strangle serpents in his manus.’

   Robert Chapman, in his Dictionary of American Slang, lists ‘shrimp’ as the equivalent of ‘peanut’, used to describe colloquially a very small person. In Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis, a man greets his friend with ‘How’re you, you poor shrimp?’ but this is merely a mild insult which signals their intimacy. ‘You shrimp’ used by one boy to another in Rabbit Redux, by John Updike, is accompanied by a blow, and is meant as a serious insult. See also Tich.