Immersed in smoke while making breakfast, Mulligan exclaims,
"Janey Mack, I'm choked!" Gifford glosses this as a
commonly used minced form of "Jesus Jack," and he cites
lines from a children's rhyme:
Janey Mac, me shirt is black,
What'll I do for Sunday?
Go to bed and cover me head
And not get up till Monday.
A similar curse-dodging follows a few sentences later: "Where's
the sugar?
O, jay, there's no milk." "Jay" here
substitutes for Jesus, as does the more familiar "Jaysus" whom
Mulligan references in
Scylla and Charybdis: "Longworth
is awfully sick, he said, after what you wrote about that old
hake Gregory. O you inquisitional drunken jewjesuit! She gets
you a job on the paper and then you go and
slate her drivel
to Jaysus. Couldn’t you do the Yeats touch?"
"Jesus Jack"—an expression that I have not seen discussed
anywhere—itself sounds like it may have resulted from toying
with the phonemes of some divine name, but the unaltered form of
"Jesus" would make it more offensive to pious ears. Molly uses
it in
Penelope while also offending racial
sensibilities: "the one they called budgers or something like a
nigger with a shock of hair on it
Jesusjack the child is a
black." Of the entire phrase, which sounds much like the
first line of the nursery rhyme quoted above, Gifford says,
"Vincent Deane reports that this is still a popular Dublin catch
phrase; its origin is unknown."
In
Proteus Stephen remembers his uncle Richie saying,
"Sit down or
by the law Harry I'll knock you down." The
phrase "by the law" here stands in for "by the Lord." "Old
Harry" is a nickname for Satan, the devil.
