Meeruse (?)

Street and harbor. Who knows? Said to be named after the mercurial Meeruse lõug (see Lõuka) and kari (see Kari) in its happy herring haven opposite, but no such record has been found… Given my sobering post-alcoholic haze of investigating this most implausible language called Estonian, one possibility rears its pink-elephantine head… What if (and this is just a ‘maybe’, but what if?...) they just looked at kari and recalled from their soused and brine-infested neurons that ghastly vocable felsenmeer and, bumbling through the eructations of yestervesperal indulgence, decided: Nah, no way, that’s too foreign – too baltisaxlane! – for our earthy, our most noble yet rudimentary tongue and thought: “Hang about, Jaan! Yes, ‘meer’, double vowel, something we can stretch out like good old Estonian knicker elastic and call it our own!” (I paraphrase.) Oh, look, shiny object somewhere…