Dave. No, the ROOT גרש can not have such an elevated, abstract, and emotionally charged meaning as 'expel, drive away.' The AHD defines 'expel' as "to force to leave' which can be understood only by knowing BEFOREHAND what is 'force' and what is 'leave.' The other definition 'to discharge from or as if from a receptacle' is no better. The (mortal) danger of starting too high and attributing to a root the already metaphoric value of a word is misconception about the meaning of other words derived from the same root. Take the word גֶּרֶשׁ as in וּמִמֶּגֶד תְּבוּאֹת שָׁמֶשׁ וּמִמֶּגֶד גֶּרֶשׁ יְרָחִים which you say (hear say) is what the earth expels (מגרשת) from herself (akin to שֶגֶר, שריג, אתרוֹג). It is a nice drush (דרוּש בגרוּש) but you will find not one six years old Hebrew speaking boy/girl who will buy (pay a grush) for this theory. The first rule of business is this: we buy no nothing from no one without proof; "he said in his book that she said in her pamphlet" is worth nothing. The HA do not have a בת קוֹל come and whisper the truth in their ear, they suck it from their thumb like the rest of us. To be continued.
I continue.
In fact, תְּבוּאֹת is not parallel to גֶּרֶשׁ but complementary to it, as שָׁמֶשׁ is complementary to יְרָחִים. Only in the one instance of חוֹרֶש 'grove' I am tempted to to think of it as חוֹרֶץ 'surging forth,' otherwise there is no instance of גֶּרֶשׁ for vegetation; יוֹק. The explanation of מִגְרָש as a place (a 'common') where cattle is driven מגוֹרש is also a השערה תלויה בשערה. Is cattle EXPELLED INTO a מגרש? Do you really believe this? ( By this logic a shelter for the Gaza evacuees is also a מגרש, or better, a מגרש מעט.) Unfortunately, even Even-Shoshan (ES) falls for this in his great dictionary (following Mandelkern in his concordance,) but, he (ES), being a prudent man, is careful enough to add his customary אוּלי "may be." We easily forgive him since his (ES's) in not an etymological dictionary and the etymologies he brings are only embellishments incidental to the definitions. I particularly abhor his 'Akkadian' etymologies (which is דרישה אל המתים) and of zero value (לא שווים גרוּש,) but Arabic, which is alive and well, is OK. To be continued.
I continue. The root גרש is 'cleave' or 'crack,' related (among others as below) to קרש from which we have קֶרֶש 'a board, a plank, a splinter' and קריש דם 'a grain (קוֹרֶט, קוּרְצָא) of clotted blood.' The word גֶּרֶשׁ derived from the root גרש is 'grits, groats,' modern Hebrew גריסים, namely, grains of threshed or crushed wheat or oats. As to מגרש it is in my opinion a מחרש ,מקרץ, a slice, a parcel, or a partition, of land cut off ( קרוץ as by ploughing, חרישה) by a border from adjoining plots of land like a חָצֵר 'a yard' (not horizontally related to חָצִיר 'hay' but having the same root meaning of 'sever, reap.') This is exactly what מגרש means today. The word גרשיים may mean 'two gritty grains,' גריסיים, while מרכאה=מאריכה. Here is the entire immediate family of גרש:
גרד, גרז, גרט, גרס, גרש
הרס
חרד, חרז, חרט, חרס, חרץ, חרש
כרס, כרץ, כרש, כרת
קרט, קרס, קרץ, קרש
all sharing the root meaning of 'grate, scrape, shred, wreck, sever, scatter, crumble. deteriorate, fragment, rot, furrow, rut, groove, grot.'
As for the great 'grush' do not forget the 'groat,' which according to AHD is: "an English silver coin worth four pence, used from the 14th to the 17th century." Recall also the mundane saying "כשבגרוּש היה חוֹר," 'when the grush had hole' (such as a bagel has), as meaning 'in bygone days' when the grush was really perforated.
פריד יצחק
"It is also important to note the difference between gershayim and merchaot מרכאות. Both refer to the punctuation mark ", but according to this Hebrew expert: [...] they have different meaning, different uses, and when using high quality typesetting - look differently."
Indeed, different Unicode characters: gershayim is ״ (in hex, 0x5f4) rather than " (0x22) (I'm not sure they'll appear different in the font used for this site, though they do in many other fonts).
As for the coin word, I'm surprised you didn't mention the English version "groat". There's a street called Groat Market in my native Newcastle.
"Klein explains the origin as "orig. meaning 'pasture land'" Does he, then, connect geresh to the English word, grass?
This 'grush' entry is from ages ago, but I just noticed it -- and it raises a question. The coin demonination 'qirsh' (plural qurush) is all over the place in the Arab world -- sometimes as an official name of a coin, sometimes as just a slangy expression for a small amount of money. Not sure how far back the word dates -- at least until the Ottomans. Any connection? Perhaps dating back to the same Latin 'grossus'?
Commenting by HaloScan
