"Give you the fantods, seemed to him."

(282.5-284.4)  With the intermission/recess period done, today's passage returns to the children's lessons.  And our subject beginning today is math.  Campbell and Robinson identify Kevin, the Shaun figure of the chapter, as the particular subject of this passage.  From the cradle, he excelled at "manual arith" because he had an innate understanding that he could count on his fingers.  He had a kind of finger obsession, giving names to each of them:  from the pinky to the thumb on the left hand, "boko," "wigworms," "tittlies," "cheekadeekchimple," and "pickpocket"; and from the thumb to the pinky on the right hand, "pickpocketpumb," "pickpocketpoint," "pickpocketprod," "pickpocketpromise," and "upwiththem."  (I say left hand first because . . . well . . . we read left to right, and because I'm going to go with the odds and assume Kevin would do the majority of his pickpocketing with his right hand.)  He also had names for the first four cardinal numerals:  "his element curdinal numen," "his enement curdinal marryng," "his epulent curdinal weisswassh," and "his eminent curdinal Kay O'Okay" (as McHugh and Campbell and Robinson note, these cardinal names parody the names of famous cardinals of the Catholic Church and signify the Viconian cycle of birth, marriage, death, and resurrection).

Young Kevin spent his time counting and performing basic math functions (adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing), and he also had a knack for using tables to make conversions between units of measurement.  But even though his ability to read, write, and perform basic arithmetic were unparalleled, he was terrible at the more advanced mathematical areas of geometry and algebra.  As the narrator explains in words that recall the language of Huckleberry Finn (another Finnegan type that's been referenced at various points throughout the book), the manner of learning and performing these subjects didn't agree with Kevin:  "They ought to told you every last word first stead of trying every which way to kinder smear it out poison long."

In illustration of Kevin's frustration with geometry, the passage ends with an example of a question posed to Kevin:  "Show that the median, hce che ech, interecting at royde angles the parilegs of a given obtuse one biscuts both the arcs that are in curveachord behind."  McHugh notes that a diagram of this problem will appear in the book a few pages down the line.  I'll wait until then to try to parse out that mess.