His
brain tipped over
U 11.665-9: — When
first I saw that form endearing …
Richie
turned.
— Si Dedalus’ voice, he said.
Braintipped,
cheek touched with flame, they listened feeling that flow endearing flow over
skin limbs human heart soul spine.
Gifford’s
suggestion (“Braintipped - That is,
the scalp tingles with pleasurable excitement”) seems more like inspired guesswork
than lexicographically sound. The evidence of contemporary usage points to a
more radical transformation brought about by Flotow’s music and Simon Dedalus’
tenor voice:
BRAIN TIPPED
Woman, Who Said She Was Once
a Boston teacher, Asked
for a
Warrant for the Arrest of Presi-
dent McKinley.
Boston Morning
Journal (1901), 28 February
He leaned back in his seat, tearing his eyes from the
racing horizon, whose speed set his brain tipping.
Walter Archer Frost, The Man
Between (1913), ch. 15 p. 145
"Well, his brain
tipped over," said the coroner's official, "that letter was written
by a crazy man."
Vance Thompson, Mr. Guelpa: A
Novel (1925), p. 205
The word formation echoes an older one: brain-touched.
The sketches — for they are only sketches — of Miss
Flite, the little woman, brain- touched — of Guppy, of Richard and Ada, Jobling
and others, are all, more or less, graphically hit off.
Southern
Quarterly Review (1854), January p.
227
"And Robert Hagburn having to bring a message from camp
to the selectmen here, had it in charge to bring the girl, whom his mother has
taken to board."
"Then the poor thing is crazy?" asked Septimius.
"A little brain-touched, that is all,"
replied Rose, "owing to some grief that she has had; but she is quite harmless
[...]"
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Septimius Felton: or, The Elixir of Life (1872), p. 77
Bloom’s later musing seem to confirm the
meaning of both words: of unsound mind, mentally “touched”, mad - and denoting,
in the case of brain-tipped, a state
in which the brain has tipped from reality towards delusion or delirium:
Cowley, he stuns himself: kind of drunkenness […]
Instance enthusiasts. All ears. Not lose a demisemiquaver. Eyes shut. Head nodding
in time. Dotty. (U 11.1191-3)
Harald Beck
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