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?" All the jargon here save "Punch" and "Dix" is cryptic, but "sawbones" pretty clearly refers to Dixon, while "ole clo" could be Stephen but is more likely 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 way of emphatically negating what follows.

"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!"

"Where the Henry Nevil" means "Where the devil?" Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner cite Eric Partridge as authority that "Henry Meville" is "rhyming slang" for the Devil. Rhyming slang is the Cockney way of substituting a rhyming word or phrase for the one intended––"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. I know nothing of Henry Meville, so I cannot say how he 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." In a personal communication, Jamie Salomon adds that Maurice Samuel's The Great Hatred (1940), a study of antisemitism, 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 be wondering where Bloom is. Lenehan is a working man rather than a student, and could feel some kinship with the Jew on that score. Mulligan called Stephen's attention to Bloom in the library, insinuating that Bloom had 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."

Slote and his collaborators suggest that the old clo' man is instead Stephen, since he is wearing Mulligan's castoff clothes and shoes. This reading finds some contextual support, since it makes sense that whoever is speaking would 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 Telemachus no one in the novel has ever mentioned Mulligan's loaning clothes to Stephen, or remarked that they look old. Pasting an antisemitic label on Bloom seems much more narratively plausible.

The Slote annotations help with two unfamiliar expressions in these sentences. In context, "Forward the ribbon counter" seems like it should mean "Let's move on to Burke's," and it does: according to Partridge, "ribbon" is "alcoholic spirits," so a bar serves ribbons over the counter much as a sewing shop does. "Sorra one of me knows" seems like it should mean something like "Sorry, I don't know," and the reality is close to that.  Dolan's Dictionary of Hiberno-English calls "sorra, also sorrow" a word "used to express absence or emphatic negative." "Sorra" negates what comes after it, but with an implied sense of "sorrow." 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." In a 24 September 2019 article in the Irish Times, Paul Clements 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."

One of the examples that Dolan cites is identical to Joyce's usage in Oxen: "'the sorra one of me knows', I don't know." On a notesheet for the chapter 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).

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John Hunt 2024