The French master in Henry Williamson’s novel of school life, Dandelion Days, habitually addresses boys as ‘miserable midget’. The word is not in general use as a vocative, but this expression is typical of the personal vocative...

In the 19th century, midget was a medical term referring to an extremely short but normally proportioned person, and was used in contrast to dwarf, which denoted disproportionate shortness. Like many other older medical terms, as it became part of...