What does the word "merds" mean?

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Neither Webster nor the OED electronic seems to know. The context, from Nabokov's "The Visit to the Museum," is as follows: "sacrilegists...were altogether very purple-faced and full of pep as they tried to extract the municipal councillor's merds from beneath the glass."

Being somewhat familiar with Nabokov, I think this might be some sort of joke I just don't get. Can someone explain it to me?

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@stuntpickle,

Nevermind. I was looking up the plural in the OED, but I have just found the singular there.

For anyone interested, "merd" means a piece of excrement.

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@stuntpickle,

stuntpickle wrote:

For anyone interested, "merd" means a piece of excrement.

From the French "merde" - (these days it occupies the same linguistic space as the word "****" does in English)

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@stuntpickle,

Maybe I shouldn't ask...but what were the municipal councillor's stools doing under glass in a museum?

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@McTag,

I suppose they were just sitting there.

Seriously though, they do not constitute a major portion of the story, which is a fantasy centered around a marvelously weird museum.

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I do not understand the context in which "merds" is used in "Gerontion," a T.S. Eliot poem :
"The goat coughs at night in the field over head / Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron merds. . . ."

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@munickat,

munickat wrote:

I do not understand the context in which "merds" is used in "Gerontion," a T.S. Eliot poem :
"The goat coughs at night in the field over head / Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron merds. . . ."

you missed out a comma.

Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.

The rocks and the moss, the stonecrop, the iron and the merds, comprise the landscape's waste, everything that civilisation rejects.

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@McTag,

I imagine it's tongue in cheek. By that, he means trivial artifacts, in the same way that Twitter updates are often described as "trivial ass drippings."

I hope this helps, haha.

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@contrex,

contrex wrote:

munickat wrote:

I do not understand the context in which "merds" is used in "Gerontion," a T.S. Eliot poem :
"The goat coughs at night in the field over head / Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron merds. . . ."

you missed out a comma.

Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.

The rocks and the moss, the stonecrop, the iron and the merds, comprise the landscape's waste, everything that civilisation rejects.

Good job Contrex.

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@McTag,

Earlier in the text Nabokov writes: " A photograph of an astonished gentleman with a pointed beard dominated an assortment of strange black lumps of various sizes. They bore a great resemblance to frozen frass..."
Frass means : the excrements of insect larvae . The custodian can not explain the nature of the exhibit, but gives the info that they were found by the Municipal Councillor depicted on the photo.

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What does the word "merds" mean?

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