[Avodah] The Tube of an Egg

[Poppers, Michael]

In Avodah V28n31, R'Micha responded to me:
> I thought the reverse... That the Maharil was diverting from common
pronunciation and spelling based on logic in contradiction to the
accepted wording.
> Picture an oil lamp like one of these
<http://www.museumsurplus.com/Pictures/9685.JPG>. The hole used to fill it is a couple of inches from the wick. Into that hole, and angling
away from the wick, is a reed being used as a thin pipe to feed in oil
from a resevoir. A lot more plausible than oil dripping from a hole
empty eggshell, and more likely to parallel something a yotzeir would
manufacture from cheres. <
I understand it's more logical to pair "sh'foferes" with a reed than an egg, but I disagree that it's more logical to feed a lamp with a reed [presumably a bridge from a reservoir, as R'Micha noted] than to feed it directly with a reservoir or that "v'yit'nena al pi haneir" is easier to perform with a swamp reed than with an eggshell (as I wrote, "it seems rather difficult to place a reed on, or even suspend it over, a lamp," although if "al pi" can be understood as meaning some hole other than the one from which the flame issues...). 

More importantly, I find this "diverting from common pronunciation and spelling" to per se be illogical in the face of l'shon CHaZaL as recorded:
(1) How is "reed" rendered elsewhere in Torah sheb'al Peh?  AFAIK, in more than one place, the word used is "qaneh."  Why a unique lashon of "sh'foferes shel bitzah" in this particular mishnah?
(2) How is "sh'foferes" used elsewhere by CHaZaL?  In BT Chulin 57b, we have "sh'foferes shel qaneh," a "tube of reed" used to splint a hen's thighbone -- seems to me if such a tube was meant by our mishnah in Shabbos, "sh'foferes shel qaneh" is a phrase the tanna could have used.  Alternatively, the mishnah could have just used "sh'foferes" for a tube (see BT Niddah 21b and Eiruvin 43b -- in the former sugya, it would seem to be the right size for a neir, and RaShY [or "RaShY"] in both places translates it as "qaneh chalul").  When, in Vayiqra Rabbah 16, "haysa m'vi'ah sh'foferes shel beitzah v'haysa m'mal'ah osahh afars'mon," would MaHaRYL also say that the word is "bitzah" and that a reed tube would be filled with balsam, or would he agree that in that situation, ChaZaL meant an eggshell?!  [Kudos to Jastrow's dictionary for the cites.]
(3) Last and not least, it seems to me from BT Sanhedrin 5b that CHaZaL were sensitive to recording the word for "swamp" in such a way that it couldn't be mistaken for the word for "egg": they spelled the plural of the Tannaitic "bitzah" with an ayin, even though, as noted by Rabbeinu Tam, the issue was one of pronunciation and the plural would properly be spelled beis-tzadi-yud-end_mem (no ayin).  I would suggest that if the intention in our mishna was to spell the word for "swamp," an ayin would have been used instead of a heih even though the Tannaitic spelling is beis-tzadi-heih just to ensure no confusion with the word for "egg."

All the best from 
-- Michael Poppers via BB pager