To the going-out entrance
U 12.1559: – Mind, Joe, says I. Show us the entrance out. When tension builds up to bursting point as a result of a nasty rumour spread about Bloom by Lenehan, the nameless I-narrator of the Cyclops episode asks Joe Hynes and the other cronies in Barney Kiernan’s to “show him the entrance out”. But after imbibing three pints, he is only going to “pumpship”, rather than leave them for good.
The paradoxical phrase entrance out was not crisply coined in 1904, as it can be traced back at least to 1863:
All the examples - including this joke from Punch,1 illustrated by Phil May - have the cliché of the naive Irishman as the originator of the phrase that Joyce picked up in the summer of 1919 in Zurich and added to his notesheets.
Harald Beck
1 First mentioned by R.W. Dent in his carefully researched Colloquial Language in Ulysses (1994), p. 145. |
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