Annotations to James Joyce's Ulysses/Cyclops/307
Annotations
editcompos mentis (Latin) A legal expression meaning of sound mind, sane.[1]
A pishogue, if you know what that is. Clearly, the Citizen does not know what that is. A pishogue is a magic spell. The Hiberno-English word he is looking for is pithogue, from the Irish piteog, which means an effeminate man, a dandy, a sissy, or (in modern usage) a homosexual, which is possibly what lies behind the Citizen's insult. The term pishogue is never applied to individuals.[2]
It is possible that the mistake is Joyce's rather than the Citizen's. The two words occur on the same page of Father Dineen's Irish-English Dictionary (first edition). Joyce certainly knew this work; it was first published in 1904, the year in which Ulysses is set, and Dineen appears in Scylla and Charybdis (202.31-32 and 206.30).[3] If the mistake is the Citizen's, it is another indication that he is not as fluent in the Irish language as he would have us believe. See also 301.24.
References
edit- ↑ Gifford (1988) 345.
- ↑ Gifford (1988) 345. Gifford, in common with most annotators, does not appreciate the Citizen's mistake.
- ↑ Dineen, Patrick S. (1904). Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla: An Irish-English Dictionary. Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son Ltd. p. 508.