The pinned flower in Martha's letter does not simply make Bloom think of a song about a woman who "lost the pin of her drawers." It evokes a street scene he once witnessed and sends local accents echoing through his head: "Flat Dublin voices bawled in his head. Those two sluts that night in the Coombe, linked together in the rain." The "Flat" quality of some Dublin speech is not referenced often in Joyce's works, and it has not been discussed much by scholars. But there are some hints to work with.

Gifford remarks without attribution that "A lower-class Dublin accent is frequently described as "flat," such as "cometty" for committee. He is referring to a moment in the story "A Mother" when Mr. Fitzpatrick evasively tells Mrs. Kearney that he will bring her demand "before the Committee" and she is tempted to mock his accent: "And who is the Cometty, pray?" Terence Brown annotates this exchange by observing that "Mrs Kearney snobbishly finds Mr Fitzpatrick's 'flat', Dublin Hiberno-Irish pronunciation unacceptable. As [Richard] Wall points out this is the only occasion in Dubliners that Joyce attempts to represent Hiberno-English pronunciation phonetically." Slote, citing the same Dubliners example, helpfully adds an insight gleaned from Bernard Share's Dublinese: Know What I Mean? (2007): "The flat Dublin accent is believed to have originated in the Liberties, a poor and working-class neighbourhood" (71).

None of this, of course, adds any examples to the one from Dubliners or provides any description of what "flat" means. But people in the Liberties have always spoken a distinctive kind of Hiberno-English. Its difference from standard middle-class Dublin English owes to the longer persistence of Irish speaking in that part of the city. In a blog post on The Liberty (www.theliberty.ie) Stephen Conaty writes, "As the city’s native Irish population came under increasing British influence from the 1600s, many English settlers wrote of how Gaelic remained the commonly spoken language on the streets. Even in the years after Cromwell, city councillors would frequently receive complaints regarding the level of Irish spoken. Furthermore, a census from that period shows Gaelic as the native tongue of the majority of modern-day Kilmainham and of roughly half the wider Dublin region. As time progressed, British presence and administration in the area strengthened, leading to a steep decline in the number of Dubliners using Irish as their first language. The Liberties seemed to somewhat buck the trend however, and was recognised by Dublin Castle as one of only two Dublin regions in which the language remained strong up to the 1830s."

This long endurance of Irish-language speaking in southwestern Dublin (Gaelic may have still been spoken in parts of the Liberties as late as the early 1900s, and it is coming back strong in the 21st century) resulted in a local English that sounds different and employs different expressions. Conaty notes that "In Irish in the Liberties published in 1985, Maírín Mooney describes the presence of the language in her locality of Pimlico, with many of the older generation of the area speaking only as Gaeilge. The extent to which Irish words made their way into the English-vernacular during that period is astounding. 'There was great rí rá all together', 'She’s a grand girseach' and 'He’s a right amadán' are but examples of the commonly heard phrases documented by Mooney."

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