"Excellency" is an honorific term of address, usually
retained permanently, that is applied to heads of state, heads
of government, and officials representing their nations in
foreign countries as ambassadors or governors. William Humble
Ward, the Earl of Dudley, served from 1902 to 1905 as the Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland, also known as the Viceroy—i.e., His
Majesty's stand-in. He was the ceremonial head of state for
the British government in Ireland.
Miss Douce's shortening of the appellation to "his ex"
is very characteristic of Dublin speech: one may hear natives
today saying things like, "I'm Dub." A different kind of slang
may create confusion for contemporary readers, making them
suppose momentarily that the phrase refers to someone's
ex-spouse. If so, the context will quickly correct them.
This brief puzzling detail could be regarded simply as a
product of Joyce's mimetic representation of popular speech,
but there is more to it. Ever since meeting Bloom's "high grade ha" in Calypso
readers have been asked to make sense of truncated words. That
quirk of the novel's prose textures becomes a pervasive form
of music-making in Sirens. Bloom makes his first
appearances in the chapter as "Bloo,"
and he deals in many other verbal fragments. As the chapter
goes on, more and more words are broken down into simpler
components and recombined in new aural arrangements.
