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"Sawbones" is commonly recognized slang for a surgeon or physician, and of all the medical students only one, Dixon, is seen acting like a doctor in the maternity hospital. The actual Joseph Francis Dixon did not receive his medical degree from Trinity College until December 1904, and early in the chapter he is called a "learningknight," but clearly he has attained some rank that confers responsibilities. The chapter refers to his treating patients at the Mater Misericordiae hospital, and when Nurse Callan comes into the common room with a question she speaks "a few words in a low tone to young Mr Dixon." When the students spill out onto the street "Dixon follows," so it may be that he hangs back long enough to excuse his absence and communicate some instructions. Apparently he is far enough behind the pack for the others to wonder what has happened to him, but close enough that he soon appears: "Hurrah there, Dix!"

"Where the Henry Nevil" means "Where the devil?" Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner cite Eric Partridge as authority that "Henry Meville" is "rhyming slang" for the Devil. Rhyming slang is the Cockney way of substituting a rhyming word or phrase for the one intended––"trouble and strife" for wife, "apples and pears" for stairs, "bottle and stopper" for copper, "cuts and scratches" for matches, "early hours" for flowers, "satin and silk" for milk. Hundreds of such expressions imply semantic linkage between the two terms: wives cause strife, apples and pears are arranged in tiers on carts, cops stop things, matches often don't light when struck, flower sellers show up early at Covent Garden, milk is smooth. I know nothing of Henry Meville, so I cannot say how he may resemble the devil.

The second person inquired after, "ole clo," is somehow associated with old clothes. Gifford surmises that this would be Bloom, since Sirens reveals that he and Molly ran a secondhand clothing business when they lived in Holles Street, and "the phrase also alludes to the tradition that dealing in old clothes was a Jewish (and somewhat deceptive or dishonest) trade." He may be right, but it seems odd that young men who know Bloom little or not at all would use such an obscure detail to refer to him, and also unlikely that they would care very much whether the "stranger" is still with them or not. The Slote annotations claim more plausibly that "ole clo" is Stephen, since he is wearing Mulligan's castoff clothes and shoes. The young men, being friends of both Mulligan and Stephen, would be more likely to know that, and much more likely to care about whether the man who proposed the drinking trip is still with them.

The Slote annotations also point the way to decoding two unfamiliar expressions in these sentences. In context, "Forward the ribbon counter" seems like it should mean "Let's move on to Burke's," and it does: according to Partridge, "ribbon" is "alcoholic spirits," so a bar serves ribbons over the counter much as a sewing shop does. "Sorra one of me knows" seems like it should mean something like "Sorry, I don't know," and the reality is close to that.  Dolan's Dictionary of Hiberno-English calls "sorra, also sorrow" a word "used to express absence or emphatic negative." "Sorra" negates what comes after it, but with an implied sense of "sorrow." Dolan quotes from Jeremiah Hogan's The English Language in Ireland (1927): "sorrow as a mild imprecation and emphatic negative is mediaeval English, and survives in Scotland and Ireland." In a 24 September 2019 article in the Irish Times, Paul Clements observes that "a wife returning from shopping who complains 'Sorra thing could I find' means there was nothing suitable in the shops––'sorra' was from sorrow, expressing disappointment."

One of the examples that Dolan cites is identical to Joyce's usage in Oxen: "'the sorra one of me knows', I don't know." On a notesheet for the chapter Joyce wrote down the equivalent "Not a one of me knows," and in Finnegans Wake he uses this expression with a different verb: "But sarra one of me cares a brambling ram" (624.14).