"Foot pound energy Irish appearing" pun?


In translating W. H. Hodgson's The Regeneration of Captain Bully Keller, I came across this sentence, which I suppose must be some kind of pun or joke, but I cannot understand at all.



He knew [...] that he had administered a knock-out blow, of a foot-energy (if I may so express it, without appearing Irish) of several hundred pounds.



I'm quite puzzled by this one, and although I suppose the joke will get lost in translation, I'd like to know whether it's my ignorance of physics or my ignorance of jokes on Irishmen to blame.



Answer



This isn’t really a joke as such, but it is a pun, centered around a not-often-seen meaning of the word Irish. The OED article on Irish has this in sense A.5.c (adj.):



colloq. (somewhat offensive). Of a statement or action: paradoxical; illogical or apparently so.



The speaker is presumably talking about boxing and thus a fist blow, but he measures its force in foot-energy. Therefore he adds “if I may say it like that without coming off too illogical, giving foot values to hand blows”.


As Compro01 points out in the comments, the foot-energy reference is most likely to the Imperial unit foot-pound, which measures energy (“the energy transferred on applying a force of one pound-force (lbf) through a displacement of one foot”), corresponding to the metric joule.


This actually makes the pun a double-pun, as it were: the unit of measurement relates to the foot as a unit of length, not the physical body part—but the speaker here puns on the dual meaning of the word foot to create a second pun on hand vs. foot.



There may even be a third layer to this pun, since Irish can also have overtones of quick-temperedness and violence; sense B.5 (n.) in the OED entry reads:



colloq. (orig. U.S.). Fieriness of temper; passion, anger, rage. Chiefly with up, esp. in to get one's Irish up.



Considering that the reference here is to a fist blow compared to feet (and thus implicitly to kicks), it may be that Irish here is intended not only to mean ‘paradoxical, illogical’, but also in a second, deeper layer ‘temperamental, violent’.


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