It’s that time of year again, so I’ll remind you of my list of modern simanim for Rosh Hashanah.
Also, in my post from the other day, I wrote about a Q-R-M vs. Q-R-S variant, meaning congealed vs. spoiled. See item #2 here:
The krum sense is of congealing, while the krus sense is of spoiling. This is an orthographic error in one direction, and since qrm is the more known word, it probably is qrs. You know, lectio difficilior.
The next daf, we encounter a related variant, namely Q-S-M vs. Q-S-S. Once again, a qosem / sorcerer is the more popular word / root, while koses meaning spoilage is the less frequent. So I’d again assume Q-S-S is right.
You could look at the variants, which IIRC roughly have the same breakdown as for the preceding variants.
What does the mem vs. the samech look like? I feel like showing just one manuscript, but of course it differs by script. This is Munich 95 on Bava Batra 97.
As you can see, the samech and mem are fairly similar, but the samech is more rounded at the bottom left. The mem sofit has it more like a straight line.
We might theorize about two letter roots vs. three letter roots, and Q-S exists for both Q-R-S and Q-S-S, but with an intermediate letter inserted within, either as a duplication or a resh. They might be absolutely synonymous, there might be slight differences in word sense, or they might have different etymologies and core meanings but via analogy and sound-similarity came to mean the same thing. Here is Jastrow on it:
So he assumes cut → bite → be sourish.
Meanwhile, for Q-R-S:
Maybe this is contract → congeal → become sourish. Note the connection to Q-R-M with a mem which does have a congealing sense.