the.com/matchstick
a tiny torch you strike against the world, carrying fire in your pocket like a dare
means A thin sliver of wood tipped with a chemical that bursts into flame when struck against a rough surface.
from From 'match' plus 'stick.' The 'match' here is the older sense — a piece of cord or wick treated to catch and hold fire, a word that came through Old French 'mesche' (wick), possibly tracing back to Latin 'myxa,' the nozzle of a lamp where the wick poked out. For centuries a 'match' was just the slow-burning fuse a soldier touched to his cannon. Only in the 19th century, with the invention of the friction match, did the word slim down to the little splint of wood you strike — and adding 'stick' simply named the obvious: fire, riding on a stick.
- head chemistry
- phosphorus, potassium chlorate, and powdered glass for friction
- safety split
- strike-anywhere kinds banned on planes for obvious reasons
- art medium
- people build entire cathedrals from thousands of them
- word origin
- once meant a candle wick, not a fire stick
- cricket slang
- a wicket's bails are nicknamed for them
the great matchstick bridge — 11.4 million matchsticks used to build a 4.5-meter bridge in australia, 2008
matchstick men paintings — euan uglow's hyper-realistic nude paintings created with matchstick-thin precision, 1950s-2000s
matchstick puzzles — logic puzzles where you move matchsticks to solve equations, popularized since the 1960s