Think of shorty as a label somebody sticks on the small one in the group. English uses -y to turn a plain fact into a name you can say out loud, so short stops describing and starts pointing: that one, the little one. Because it is a name and not a description, the feeling travels with whoever is speaking. The same word can be an insult across a , a family tease, a warm word for your own kid, or a quick tag on the short model of a jacket.
From the word’s history
Wiktionary gives the form as short plus -y, going back through Middle English schort to Old English sceort. The suffix -y is the part that turns the adjective into a name, which is why shorty is almost always something you call a person or a product rather than a way to describe one.
Wiktionary 記錄的組成是 short 加 -y，往回可以追到中古英語 schort、古英語 sċort。關鍵在 -y 這個尾巴：它把形容詞變成一個可以拿來叫的名字。這正好解釋了為什麼 shorty 幾乎都是用來「叫」一個人或一款東西，而不是用來描述。把嘻哈裡的用法接到這個畫面上，是意思上的連結，不是歷史上的證據。
Wiktionary (kaikki extract, source_ref kaikki:3f6f69a190036ae4:1492765948:20334): From short + -y, with the tree Old English sċort > Middle English schort > English short.
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