Annotations to James Joyce's Ulysses/Cyclops/307

Annotations
compos mentis   (Latin) A legal expression meaning of sound mind, sane.

A pishogue, if you know what that is.   Clearly, the Citizen does not know what that is. A pishogue is a magic spell. The Hiberno-English word he is looking for is pithogue, from the Irish piteog, which means an effeminate man, a dandy, a sissy, or (in modern usage) a homosexual, which is possibly what lies behind the Citizen's insult. The term pishogue is never applied to individuals.

It is possible that the mistake is Joyce's rather than the Citizen's. The two words occur on the same page of Father Dineen's Irish-English Dictionary (first edition). Joyce certainly knew this work; it was first published in 1904, the year in which Ulysses is set, and Dineen appears in Scylla and Charybdis (202.31-32 and 206.30). If the mistake is the Citizen's, it is another indication that he is not as fluent in the Irish language as he would have us believe. See also 301.24.