fiend, you

   The Oxford English Dictionary, in its inimitable way, remarks that fiend can be ‘applied with jocular hyperbole to a person or agency causing mischief or annoyance’. The reference is to expressions like ‘autograph-fiend’, ‘cyclist-fiend’, which were at one time current. But ‘jocular hyperbole’ seems just right for the modern use of ‘you fiend’, which instantly conjures up the late-night horror movie. A being of superhuman wickedness stalks innocent victims until confronted by the hero: ‘Now I have you, you fiend!’ he says, and the audience knows that it will soon be time for bed. ‘Fiend’ originally meant ‘enemy’, but quickly came to mean the arch enemy of mankind, the devil. Certain speakers might still use it seriously to someone whose behaviour they considered to be evil. ‘White fiend!’ says a black doctor to a white man, in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers. Shake-speare used it as a vocative with full force in many of his plays, though in Twelfth Night he has the Clown address the devil that is supposed to be plaguing Malvolio as ‘hyperbolical fiend’, a good example of hyperbole in itself.