Porcelain.
A kind of shell that we call the shell of Venus, this shell is beautiful and smooth, a little oval, flat along the slit, white inside and the rest, very hard, ”says Richelet in 1680 in his dictionary.
Is it any wonder that this definition is so suggestive in its description?
Not really.
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What is the origin of the word porcelain?
Let us recall very clearly that the word porcelain was borrowed from the Italian porcellana, itself derived from porcella (sow).
This is because the shell looks like a "sow's vulva", as the Academicians specify in the ninth edition of their Dictionary.
But how did we go from this explicit organ to the delicate ceramic object?
In his Notice of enamels, jewels and various objects exhibited in the galleries of the Louvre Museum, Léon de Laborde, curator of the Middle Ages collections, indicates that porcelain is the mother-of-pearl of the shell.
“This expression, as the Littré reports, apart from a few unimportant variations,
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