If you want to REALLY dig into the scholarship of what that word means then you’ll want to find a good commentary.  Strangely the Hermeneia series doesn’t have either 1 or 2 Samuel, but the Yale Anchor Bible series does (the latter is the one I normally prefer, but it depends on who wrote a particular commentary really).  These books will normally give an exhaustive discussion of words or topics that are unclear so I suspect they’ll give it a pretty good treatment with various ideas on what the word means.  If your curiosity isn’t quite so strong as to make you pay $25.98 for a used hardback copy on Amazon then try this website which is my go-to site for a quick reference on things: ** you do not have permission to see this link **.  There are some brief commentaries in the left column at the bottom.  This sounds like one of those things where there are going to be a lot of opinions because no one seems to know with certainty exactly what emerods referred to or if it meant the same thing every time the word occurred.