Quote Originally Posted by gRomoZeka View Post
You are mixing things.
"Крошка" as a crumb is one thing, and "крошка" as a quality of a person is another. The latter it's an emotionally charged word that implies a tiny size (often figuratively, just like "baby" in English does not necessarily mean that the person is young) and corresponds to "крохотный" ("tiny"). They have different grammatical qualities, and it's represented in dictionaries:

крошка
I м. и ж.
(о ребёнке) little one
II ж.
(хлеба и т.п.) crumb

It says clearly that "крошка" in its first meaning can be either masculine or feminine, i.e. of common gender.
i think the second meaning is derived from the original meaning, which i think is a crumb
i'm not talking about the variety of modern meanings of the word but about the primal one

if you review the words in the common gender list, none of them describes insentient object, these will represent either human characteristic, profession or occupation

adjectives крохотный and крошечный impose a quality of a crumb onto the objects they describe, which if you break it down means 'small like a crumb'

the verb крошить doesn't mean 'to make small' but 'to break something into tiny pieces (or crumbs)'