The rabbits that caused all the trouble 15.2698-702: ([… ] Bloom […] takes the chocolate from his pocket and offers it nervously to Zoe.) ZOE (sniffs his hair briskly.) Hmmm! Thank your mother for the rabbits. I'm very fond of what I like. Neither Thornton and Gifford nor Dent so much as mention this expression. Documentary evidence outside Ulysses shows two different meanings for the catch phrase: a) the meaning which is still current in Australia: “an old way of saying farewell” (John Miller, The Lingo Dictionary: Of Favourite Australian Words and Phrases, 2011), and b) the
meaning probably intended by Zoe and known in Ireland as evidenced by Padraic
O'Farrell in How the Irish speak English, 1993, p. 12:
The earliest source so far seen is
from Chambers's Journal of 1917:
It is hard to say what the
“inane remark” means here. Similarly ambiguous is the next example:
This Australian newspaper
source seems to indicate that the expression may have customarily have been followed by “it
was (or they were) lovely”:
It is interesting to see that Eric Partridge, too, faced problems when commenting on the phrase in his Dictionary of Catch Phrases American and British (1985) p. 294:
Harald Beck
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