Remembering the multifarious shells that his employer keeps in a "stone mortar" on his office table, Stephen thinks, "Dominie Deasy kens them a'." A dominie is a Scottish schoolmaster, often one in the Protestant Church of Scotland. In Scottish dialect, this one kens (knows) a' (all) the types of shells. The implication that Deasy is ethnically Scottish sits in some tension with his Irish name.

The term "dominie" is not unknown among Irish Catholics—in his memoir Silent Years, J. F. Byrne uses it for one of his teachers at Belvedere College (23)—but its origins are Scottish. Stephen apparently lapses into Scottish idiom because Deasy is from Ulster, much of which was settled by Scottish emigrants in the 17th century. Richard Ellmann reports that the real-life headmaster on whom Joyce modeled him, Francis Irwin, was an "Ulster Scot, very pro-British" (33). He notes, however, that the fictive name Joyce gives him is "oddly inappropriate for an Ulster Scot." Deasy is an Irish name associated with counties in the south and west, far from Ulster. There are some Deasy families in Scotland, but they are relatively rare and may possibly have resulted from emigration in the other direction.

One might speculate about the history of intermarriage (all of it fictional) that could have produced such a chimerical creature, but since Joyce's novel does nothing of the sort it probably makes more sense to assume that the author simply indulged two slightly incompatible impulses. He wanted his character to embody financial prudence and Scots-Irish loyalty to the English crown. He also wanted to give him a name that would undercut his claim that "We are all Irish, all kings' sons."

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