A single WORD

"Uncanny" is a word of Scottish origin.  The word carries with it this history of meanings:

• Careless, incautious
• Not quite safe to trust to, or to have dealings with, as being associated with supernatural arts or powers. (The OED gives this example, among others, from Sir Walter Scott's 1815 novel, Guy Mannering, "I wish she binna uncanny! her words dinna seem to come in God's name, or like other folk's.")
• Partaking of supernatural character, mysterious, weird, uncomfortably strange or unfamiliar
• Unpleasantly severe or hard
• Dangerous, unsafe

The word comes from negating the word "to know how, to be able".

Considering how characteristic ellipsis is in Old Cotter's speech is around the boy, and considering how he is constrained not to speak his own thoughts fully--no doubt by a sense of propriety (that is, there is a moral force at work causing him to erupt in dots), then is it unsportsmanlike to consider his word uncanny as elliptical in itself?  That is, to wonder if he  may have left out part of the thought that produced the sound uncanny.

If we do, could the ellipsis be hiding uncannonic (or uncannonical) which comes from the same roots and means:

• Not in accordance with ecclestical canons
• Of dress, pastimes, etc.: Unclerical, unbecoming to 'the cloth'.
• Not belonging to the canon of Scripture. 

The OED again cites Scott, this time from his 1919 novel Ivanhoe: "Are you not afraid he may pay you a visit during some of your uncannonical pastimes?"

Readers of this story come to understand that Old Cotter considers Fr. Flynn to have had an uneasy relationship to his Church.  See, for instance, the note to the line "one of those...peculiar cases".  But the implications are all here in one word, and we can see them if we begin to see the forces that have bowed Old Cotter: forces of religion and morality that have taught him to hold his tongue and to compress his thoughts and emotions.  Old Cotter speaks in innuendo from his sense of decency and responsibility, but he --and here the reader must make a choice-- either says more than he knows, or knows more than he says, depending on how much credence you put on interpretations like this.  In either case, the boy despises him in this role but doesn't understand him.  We do, though.