squirt, you little

squirt, you little
   ‘Get away, you little squirt, before I spit on thi an’ drown thi,’ says a boy from the north of England to another in Kes, by Barry Hines. ‘Squirt’ is now thought of as a fairly mild insult, usually addressed to children, especially if they are smaller than average. It would once have been far more insulting, since ‘squirt’ formerly referred to the thin excrement associated with diarrhoea, or to diarrhoea itself. By the nineteenth century ‘squirts’ was used in that sense, though only in the dialects of south-west England. British dictionaries tend to say that ‘squirt’ in its slang sense of a paltry person originated in the USA.
   Robert Chapman’s Dictionary of American Slang says that this meaning was imported into America from Britain. It is used by the Australian author Nevil Shute in No Highway, where ‘you bloody little squirt’ is a covert endearment.

A dictionary of epithets and terms of address . . 2015.

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