Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.
For the record (in case of future duplicate votes), there is a comment from the OP "Yes! That’s it! Thank you!" on Occam Shave's answer below. Unfortunately, the comment was deleted by a flag from another user, and even mods are unable to delete it.
As this doesn't seem to be a sci-fi or fantasy story, I've migrated it over to the Literature site for you. Please link up your Stack Exchange account to Literature as well; then the question should be automatically associated to your account, and you'll be able to edit it or respond to comments there.
Could it be that the OP is conflating two stories and there's some entirely unrelated short story, perhaps from the 1950s, with the unclear/nuclear wordplay? The latter seems too memorable to have been entirely misremembered.
I'm not sure if this is really a pure story-ID question though. It sort of combines story-ID (which your answer addresses) with a question about a specific franchise (and the other answer is solely about the Borrowers). It might be wise to not directly dupehammer even if this answer is accepted, or at least to discuss it on meta first.
