Re: Inkhorns are a fascinating linguistic phenomenon, ...

On 17/09/2024 11:08 p.m., Peter Moylan wrote:

On 17/09/24 16:44, Silvano wrote:

Peter Moylan hat am 17.09.2024 um 01:32 geschrieben:

 

That reminds me of an incident in an earlier job of hers, when she
 worked in a psychiatric hospital. A small town north of Newcastle
had had no doctor for a long time, but Australia has a policy of
getting immigrant doctors out to rural areas, so they finally got
someone. That doctor sent one of his patients down to the psych
hospital for assessment. The clinical notes said that he was
obsessed with attacking birds.
>
When interviewed, one of the first things he said was "Stone the
crows, I don't know why they sent me here."

>
I assume that "stone the crows" is a common idiom in that part of
Australia. 1) What does it mean? 2) Do native speakers of other
varieties of English know and use that idiom?

 Good questions. It's an Australian expression, and more specifically
from the language of rural areas rather than the cities. I believe it's
understood in England, although the English clearly view it as an
Australianism. I have no idea whether it is also known in the rest of
GB&Ireland. It is probably not understood in North America, except among
those exposed to a lot of Australian literature.
 Meaning: it's a general expression of surprise or incredulity. An
approximate equivalent is "Bloody Hell".
 Etymology: nobody is sure. It could derive from times when farmers hired
people to throw stones at crows who were damaging the crops, but
personally I can't see how that would evolve into an expression of
surprise. I suspect that it's just a phrase that someone made up, and
adopted by others who found it colourful.

OED labels the expression "esp. Australian". They find it in three Australian books from the 1930s, then a couple post-war which don't have any obvious Aus connection. One is "The Otterbury Incident" by Cecil Day Lewis (1948), a book for children which sounds interesting.
These things do get around. Some British readers would surely have been exposed to it through the "Barry McKenzie" comic strip which ran in _Private Eye_ during the 1960s, though it might have been lost in the profusion of Australianisms (real and fanciful) which adorned that strip.
I had a distant memory of "Stone the crows!" being used by a couple of stray Australian characters who wandered through another comic strip, "Pogo", at some point. Wikipedia helps:
"There are occasional forays into exotic locations as well, including at least two visits to Australia (during the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, and again in 1961). The Aussie natives include a bandicoot, a lady wallaby, and a mustachioed, aviator kangaroo named "Basher"."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_(comic_strip)