In the first edition of Ulysses, Lydia Douce serves George Lidwell a drink while listening to Simon Dedalus sing M'appari, and a phrase from that song, "ray of hope," enters the narration: "Lydia for Lidwell squeak scarcely hear so ladylike the muse unsqueaked a ray of hopk." The final letter would seem to be a typesetter's error, one of thousands in the Shakespeare & Co. text, and indeed it was corrected to "hope" in the Odyssey Press editions of the 1930s. But Gabler's 1984 edition restores the nonsense word "hopk"—properly so, since Joyce evidently wanted to insinuate the sound of a cork popping out of a bottle. 

In the version of the chapter that Joyce published in The Little Review in August 1919, the sentence ends with a different word: "Lydia for Lidwell squeak scarcely hear so ladylike the muse unsqueaked a cork." The text in the Rosenbach manuscript is identical. So Joyce's original intention, it seems clear, was to show Miss Douce opening a bottle, and in keeping with all the musical onomatopoeia of the chapter he wanted to merge the "squeak" of cork sliding past glass with the melodic strains floating out of the saloon.

But by the time the sentence was set to type in Dijon, he had also found a way to include the sound that the cork makes when it finally flies out of the bottle. The word "cork" was mostly replaced by the "hope" of the song, because that word sounds a bit like "pop," a word that Joyce associates with corks elsewhere in Sirens. ("Popped corks, splashes of beerfroth, stacks of empties"; "by slops, by empties, by popped corks.") Only a small bit of "cork" was allowed to remain, a plosive "k" that joins with the plosive "p" to doubly evoke the explosive event. The verbal music-making is brilliant.

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