When you hearstuffed shirt, you get a mental image of a retrograde, an inflexible old-fashioned conservative, maybe an arrogant poseur with no substance. The latter is probably the closest to the truth, as the idiom was actually born as a literal description of a scarecrow, dressed in real person’s clothes and stuffed with whatever was on hand to create the shape: hay, paper, rags… In other words, no substance. It has done its job, however, scaring away not only crows, but also other potential enemies of the crops.
Scarecrows have existed for millennia but they had not always worn shirts, stuffed or otherwise. In Ancient Egypt, the fields were devastated not by crows but by quail. Inventive farmers would install wooden construction wrapped in nets. Stupid quail would get themselves tangled up in those nets and end up as a farmer’s dinner. Talking about killing two birds with…
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