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
references here are cryptic, but it seems that "sawbones" is
Dixon and "ole clo" Stephen. "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. Hundreds of such
expressions imply semantic linkage between the two terms:
wives cause strife, apples and pears are arranged in tiers on
carts, cops stop 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." He may be right, but it seems
odd that young men who know Bloom little or not at all would
use such an obscure detail to refer to him, and also unlikely
that they would care very much whether the "stranger"
is still with them or not. The Slote annotations claim more
plausibly that "ole clo" is Stephen, since he is wearing Mulligan's
castoff clothes and shoes. The young men, being
friends of both Mulligan and Stephen, would be more likely to
know that, and much more likely to care about whether
the man who proposed the drinking trip is still with them.
The Slote annotations also point the way to decoding 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).
