Left-off clothes
U 11.496-7: Mrs Marion Bloom has left off clothes of all descriptions Don Gifford cites Vincent Deane’s explanation that the joke rests on
the presence or absence of a hyphen in an old advertisement displayed on trams,
in which “left-off” means “second-hand” or “cast-off” – “Miss White has
left-off clothes of every description”. The expression was in fact widely used
in advertisements at the end of the century. See, for example, the Irish Times of 13 January, 1883 (p. 8):
The advertisement generated comment and jokes before Joyce adopted it, as in Frank Leslie’s Pleasant Hours (1873: vol. 13, p. 476):
and the Cleveland (Ohio) Medical Gazette of 1893 (vol. 8, p. 38):
In 1894 the fashionable Pall Mall Magazine offered much the same humorous fare:
John Simpson |
Joyce's Environs >