In the familiar game of "hopscotch," children either
scratch into dirt, or mark onto pavement with chalk, a
sequence of numbered spaces ending in a "safe" or "home"
space. The game begins with a player tossing a small stone or
some other flat marker into the first square and hopping
through the sequence on one foot without touching the square
that the stone occupies. (When two spaces lie side by side,
both feet are used as long as neither square contains the
stone.) At the end of the course, the player turns around in
the safe space and repeats the sequence in reverse, bending
over to pick up the stone on the way back. Then the stone is
thrown into the second square, and the third, and so on
through all the numbers. The turn ends when the thrown stone
misses the required square or touches a line, or when the
player's feet do the same thing. After other players have had
their turns, the next turn starts from the point where the
last one broke off. The first player to complete all the
sequences wins the game.
In Ireland the stone was called a "pickeystone" or piggy. Bloom sees a stone
still lying in the maze, a sign that some children were
recently playing there, as he walks over the court "With
careful tread," no doubt making sure not to step on any
lines. The subtle evocation of remembering childhood continues
as he recalls the chant that, according to Gifford, opposing
players would yell at the child who stepped on a line: "You're
a sinner; you're a sinner." His thought, "Not a sinner,"
shows him still defending himself in imagination against these
loud jeers from his God-fearing Catholic playmates. One
imagines Bloom not having been physically graceful or hugely
popular as a child, so he may have endured this verbal
gauntlet with some discomfort.
The game of "marbles" is played with small balls made
of stone, clay, or glass, painted in bright colors or marked
with colorful stripes. A circle several feet in diameter is
drawn on the ground with chalk or string. Marbles called
"ducks" are placed near the center of the circle, sometimes in
a pattern. Players take turns holding another marble in a hand
pressed to the ground and launching it in hopes of knocking
one of the ducks out of the ring but keeping the shooter
marble inside it. Players collect any marbles they succeed in
knocking out of the ring and, as in hopscotch, they keep
shooting until they miss. At the end of the game, the player
who has collected the most marbles wins. (In some versions of
the game the shooter marble is removed at the end of each
turn. In other versions it is not. In "friendlies," the
marbles that have been won are returned to the children who
brought them. In "keepsies" they are not.)
The shooter marble, which is usually large and heavy to carry
more momentum, is called the "taw." The child in Lotus
Eaters is launching it in a particular manner: "shooting
the taw with a cunnythumb." The connotations of this
last word may possibly be negative. Slote notes that "cunny"
is "pejorative for a woman," and, citing the phrase
"cunny-thumbed" in Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang,
he suggests that Joyce's word involves "the stereotype that
women clench their fists to punch with the thumb enclosed in
their fingers." By this reading, the child that Bloom sees
kneeling on the ground has a weak, effeminate way of shooting.
If Bloom recognizes the technique and the name, it may remind
him of his own play, because he was not skilled in the game.
Five sentences later he thinks, "And once I played marbles
when I went to that old dame’s school."
The pejorative connotations of "cunnythumb" need not remain
conjectural. It was one recognized way of shooting marbles.
The website of the American Toy Marble Museum shows an
illustration of the technique and makes this comment: "If
Little Lord Fauntleroy played marbles, any boy could tell you
how he would shoot. He would hold his hand vertically; place
his taw or shooter against his thumb-nail and his first
finger. He would shoot 'cunny thumb style,' or 'scrumpy
knuckled.' The thumb would flip out weakly (Fig. 5), and the
marble would roll on its way."
Much better would be the virilely effective style of a Tom
Sawyer or a Huck Finn: "Tom Sawyer would lay the back of his
fist on the ground or on his mole-skin 'knuckle dabster,' hold
his taw between the first and second joints of the second
finger and the first joint of the thumb, the three smaller
fingers closed and the first finger partially open (Fig. 6).
From this animated ballista the marble would shoot through the
air for four or five feet, alighting on one of the ducks in
the middle of the ring, sending it flying outside, while the
taw would spin in the spot vacated by the duck. Tom or Huck
Finn would display as much skill with his taw as an expert
billiard player would with the ivory balls."
In addition to cries of "You're a sinner," then, Joyce's
sentences may possibly evoke fears of shooting like a girl.
Children's games afford endless opportunities for humiliation,
and it does not take much imagination to draw a line from
Bloom's childhood experiences to his present-day experiences
of having to defend himself against charges of cuckoldry, effeminacy, ethnic inferiority, and
political disloyalty.
[2023] A personal communication from David Rayner, though,
suggests that there may be nothing negative about the word
"cunnythumb." In Rayner's childhood in Warrington, a northern
English town between Liverpool and Manchester, the game of
marbles was called "cullies." This usage was apparently common
in Scotland. A 1952 entry in the Dictionaries of Scots
Language defines "cully" as a shooter marble (equivalent
to "taw" in Joyce's text) and "cully-thumb" as "a boy's term
for shooting a marble off the middle of the forefinger instead
of off the tip in the usual manner." The entry notes that
these usages appear to derive from "Eng. slang cully,
a fellow, companion." If Joyce's Irish slang has sprouted from
such roots (and the history of emigration between Ireland and
Liverpool makes that seem quite possible), then there is
probably no implication of effeminacy.
