I received a query about this word, which shows up via Google® mostly in the intro to Ammon Shea's "Insulting English" or in "Gargantua and Pantagruel" or some very bad poetry. Can anyone define diamerdis?

tsuwm, I'm looking at Novabatzky & Shea's Depraved and Insulting English, which combines their earlier volumes Depraved English. and Insulting English. There I find

diamerdis: a man who is covered in feces.

"Man" leaves me curious if there is a feminine or juvenile form of the word.

Relevant here are the very first words of the book's introduction. "Amidst the grand panoply that is the English language, largest on this Earth, tongue of Shakespeare, Byron, and Melville, there are a puzzling number of words that mean 'to spray with shit.'" Such or similar words include

• imbulbiate - to defecate in one's pants
• immerd - to cover with excrement
• conskite - to bespatter with dung.

ah, remindful of ye olde Reverse Midas Touch®*. I think I'll just reply discreetly to this query and leave the general theme for others to delve. (It wouldn't be worth dealing with all of the Spam Assassin rejections.) Thanks.

*everything I touch turns to $#!+

Manure, Excrement

A bit of cross-threading, right Jerry?!

We occasionally have a cat covered in excrement. Can I use this word?

This suggests that the French slang, "merde," has a non-slang source. "Dia," Greek, and "merde," French. Perhaps this is like the Anglo-Saxon words such as "shit" and "piss" that became indecent after the Norman invasion, but were once the proper terms.

We occasionally have a cat covered in excrement.
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Are you leading up to the joke about the bear who asked the cat whether excrement stuck to its fur?


Can I use this word?
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It appears that you can, and you may, as far as I am concerned!

Likewise with caninemerdis; it sounds so much better than what we call it!

quote:

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Originally posted by Asa Lovejoy:
This suggests that the French slang, "merde," has a non-slang source.

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M-W lists "merde" as a word in English, taken from French (1920), and traces it back as "from Latin merda; perhaps akin to Lithuanian smirdeti to stink."

There are at least three books dealing with this topic:

Merde : excursions in scientific, cultural, and sociohistorical coprology by Ralph A. Lewin. New York : Random House, c1999.

Merde! : the real French you were never taught at school by Genevieve.
New York : Atheneum, 1986.

Merde encore! by Genevieve.
New York : Atheneum, 1987, c1986.

Tinman

Merde encore! by Genevieve.

Sounds like a line form the old popular song, "Chanson d'amour." As in, "Chanson d'amour/merde encore."

quote:

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Originally posted by tinman:
Merde! : the real French you were never taught at school by Genevieve.
New York : Atheneum, 1986.

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I own a copy of
Merda! : The REAL Italian you were never taught in school
by Roland Delicio (1993).

Which teaches that "a catastrophic failure" is finire in merda (literally, to end in ~~~~).