As the young men spill out of the hospital and start down the street to the pub, they call out for several missing companions: "Where the Henry Nevil's sawbones and ole clo? Sorra one o' me knows. Hurrah there, Dix! Forward the ribbon counter. Where's Punch?" Except for "Punch" and "Dix" all the jargon here is cryptic, but "sawbones" pretty clearly refers to Dixon, while "ole clo" could be Stephen but is more likely an antisemitic label attached to Bloom. "Henry Nevil" introduces Cockney rhyming slang into the linguistic turmoil of these closing paragraphs of Oxen, and "ribbon counter" is a similarly roundabout way of referring to Burke's pub. "Sorra" is an Irish and Scottish way of emphatically negating whatever comes next.

"Sawbones" is commonly recognized slang for a surgeon or physician, and of all the medical students only one, Dixon, is seen acting like a doctor in the maternity hospital. The actual Joseph Francis Dixon did not receive his medical degree from Trinity College until December 1904, and early in the chapter he is called a "learningknight," but clearly he has attained some rank that confers responsibilities. The chapter refers to his treating patients at the Mater Misericordiae hospital, and when Nurse Callan comes into the common room with a question she speaks "a few words in a low tone to young Mr Dixon." When the students spill out onto the street "Dixon follows," so it may be that he hangs back long enough to excuse his absence and communicate some instructions. Apparently he is far enough behind the pack for the others to wonder what has happened to him, but close enough that he soon appears: "Hurrah there, Dix!"

Various annotators, starting with Gifford, have identified "Where the Henry Nevil" as rhyming slang for "Where the devil?" Rhyming slang is the Cockney way of cryptically replacing a word with a rhyming phrase––"trouble and strife" for wife, "apples and pears" for stairs, "bottle and stopper" for copper, "cuts and scratches" for matches, "early hours" for flowers, "satin and silk" for milk. The many dozens or even hundreds of such expressions imply semantic linkage between the two terms: a wife causes strife, apples and pears are arranged in tiers on carts, cops put a stop to things, matches often don't light when struck, flower sellers show up early at Covent Garden, milk is smooth. Gifford notes two men named Henry Neville who might be referenced in Joyce's expression, one a Catholic professor at Maynooth and the other an English actor known for his roles in Dion Boucicault's plays. He does not specify how either may resemble the devil.

The second person inquired after, "ole clo," is somehow associated with old clothes. Gifford surmises that this would be Bloom, since Sirens reveals that he and Molly ran a secondhand clothing business when they lived in Holles Street, and "the phrase also alludes to the tradition that dealing in old clothes was a Jewish (and somewhat deceptive or dishonest) trade." These inferences make a lot of sense. Bloom got his start in adult life as a door-to-door salesman, like his father, and it seems likely that this later gave him the idea of starting a used-clothing business. Most traveling salesmen in the 19th century were Jewish, and they often received enmity from people who distrusted their ethnicity, their rootlessness, and the competition they posed to established merchants. Among the many goods that they peddled, clothes were perhaps the most famous. In London Labour and the London Poor (1851), Henry Mayhew observes that "street-Jews, engaged in the purchase of second-hand clothes" had been seen on the streets of London since the 18th century. "Now, as during the last century," he writes, these people fill "every street, square, and road, with the monotonous cry, sometimes like a bleat, of 'Clo’! Clo’!'”

These cries evidently became a common way of demeaning Jews. In a personal communication, Jamie Salomon notes that Maurice Samuel's The Great Hatred, a study of antisemitism published in 1940, identifies "old clo' man" as an anti-Jewish slur (17). Samuel describes someone using the phrase in a way that suggests it was a widely recognized idiom in the first half of the 20th century (107). Salomon supposes that the person referring to Bloom as an old clo' man could be either Mulligan or Lenehan. Mulligan uses two other common antisemitic slurs, "sheeny" and "Ikey Moses," to refer to Bloom in Scylla and Charybdis, and in Wandering Rocks Lenehan tells M'Coy that Bloom is "not one of your common or garden... You know...," while in Cyclops he jumps to the antisemitic assumption that he is greedy with money: "The courthouse is a blind. He had a few bob on Throwaway and he's gone to gather in the shekels."

Either of these men might have reason to inquire after Bloom's location. Lenehan is a working man rather than a student and could feel some kinship with the Jew on that score. Mulligan calls Stephen's attention to Bloom in the library, insinuating that Bloom has sexual designs on him, and he is startled to find him sitting in the hospital's common room: "seeing the stranger, he made him a civil bow and said, Pray, sir, was you in need of any professional assistance we could give?" The word "stranger" itself may convey anti-Jewish sentiment, and later in the chapter this word is associated with both men: "The gods too are ever kind, Lenehan said. If I had poor luck with Bass's mare perhaps this draught of his may serve me more propensely. He was laying his hand upon a winejar: Malachi saw it and withheld his act, pointing to the stranger and to the scarlet label."

In an alternative interpretation, Slote and his collaborators suggest that the old clo' man is Stephen, since he is wearing old clothes and shoes that Mulligan gave him. This reading too could be justified contextually: whoever is speaking might well want to know whether the man who proposed the drinking trip is still with them, and a heartbeat later Stephen is seen emerging from the hospital into the street ("Jay, look at the drunken minister coming out of the maternity hospal!"). But after the first chapter no one in Ulysses mentions that Mulligan has loaned clothes to Stephen, and no one comments on those clothes looking old. Pasting an antisemitic label on Bloom seems more plausible both narratively and linguistically.

In context, "Forward the ribbon counter" seems like it should mean "Let's move on to Burke's," and it does. According to Partridge (cited by Slote and his colleagues), "ribbon" is "alcoholic spirits," so a bar serves ribbons over the counter much as a sewing shop does. (As Gifford notes, in Hades Simon Dedalus calls Mulligan a "counterjumper's son," referring to clothing shops.)

"Sorra one of me knows" seems like it should mean something like "Sorry, I don't know," and the reality is close to that. Jorn Barger calls it a Scottish way of saying "Not one of me knows," inferring that the speaker must be the Scotsman Crotthers. The expression is equally Irish, however. Dolan's Dictionary of Hiberno-English calls "sorra, also sorrow" a word "used to express absence or emphatic negative." Dolan quotes from Jeremiah Hogan's The English Language in Ireland (1927): "sorrow as a mild imprecation and emphatic negative is mediaeval English, and survives in Scotland and Ireland." One of the examples that he cites is identical to Joyce's usage: "'the sorra one of me knows', I don't know."  On a notesheet for Oxen Joyce wrote down the equivalent "Not a one of me knows," and in Finnegans Wake he uses this expression with a different verb: "But sarra one of me cares a brambling ram" (624.14). The etymological connection between negation and sorrow can be appreciated in an example that Paul Clements offers in a 24 September 2019 article in the Irish Times. He observes that "a wife returning from shopping who complains 'Sorra thing could I find' means there was nothing suitable in the shops––'sorra' was from sorrow, expressing disappointment."

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