the.com/eggshell
a fortress one chick can demolish but a grown human cannot crush end-to-end.
means The thin, brittle calcium-carbonate casing of a bird's egg, prized as a near-white paint color and a byword for fragility.
from A plain Old English compound, exactly what it says: 'egg' plus 'shell.' 'Egg' itself is the interesting traveler — Middle English borrowed the Norse 'egg' from Viking settlers, edging out the native Old English 'ey' (which survives faintly in the old word 'cockney,' literally 'cock's egg'). 'Shell' is the homegrown Old English 'sciell,' a cousin of 'scale' and 'skull,' all rooted in a sense of something split or cut off as a hard covering. So the word is half-Norse, half-Saxon — two old tongues fused around one delicate object.
- crush trick
- squeeze the ends; the dome geometry survives bare hands
- breathing wall
- riddled with up to 17000 microscopic pores
- mostly chalk
- about 95 percent calcium carbonate, like limestone
- garden gold
- crushed shells deter slugs and feed soil
- paint name
- its soft sheen named an entire finish
eggshell porcelain — chinese ceramic ware from jingdezhen, ming dynasty (1368-1644), so thin it's translucent
eggshell paint finish — benjamin moore, sherwin-williams, and other paint manufacturers offer this as a standard sheen level between matte and satin