A Georgia caller says when her grandfather had to make a sudden stop while driving, he’d yell “hold ‘er Newt, she smells alfalfa!” This phrase and variations like “hold ‘er Newt, she’s a-headin’ for the pea patch!” and “hold ‘er Newt, she’s headin’ for the barn!” allude to controlling a horse that’s starting to bolt for a favorite destination. The name Newt has long been a synonym for “dolt” or “bumpkin.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Hold ‘er Newt!”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Heather, originally from Georgia, now living in San Diego.
How are you?
We’re great, thank you for asking.
Hey, Heather, a transplanted southerner, I love it.
Yeah, via Philly, too.
Via Philly, okay, so you’re a linguistic mess.
Quite the journey.
What’s on your mind?
Well, I’ve had this question lingering.
When I was a little girl growing up, my dad, when we were driving, he would, as we were, you know, coming up behind a car and had to stop pretty quickly or something happened in the roadway and we just had to kind of slam on the brakes.
If I was in the front seat, he’d kind of put his arm across me and then he would say, “Hold her, Newt, she smells alfalfa.”
I say it now and I have no idea what it means.
And so I thought I would call you guys and ask you what it means.
Hold her, Newt, she smells alfalfa.
Exactly.
And he grew up in Missouri and he said his dad said it.
So my grandpa said it too.
Yeah.
But nobody knows where it came from.
So, Heather, your dad didn’t give you any idea who Newt was or who she is?
Nope.
None at all?
Nope.
But he used that universal parental gesture, right, of sticking your arm across the seat to protect the kid.
That’s right.
Stop them from flying through the windshield.
So, Heather, what about your dad’s background?
Was he a farmer in the military?
No.
No.
He grew up in St. Louis.
St. Louis, okay.
He’s always worked in the shoe business.
And for different companies, and he’s never been much on the farm.
My mom was more so on the farm in Iowa, but not dad.
Okay.
Yeah, the reason I ask is because it is sort of a farmy kind of image.
The idea is that you’re telling somebody to hold a horse because she smells alfalfa, and the image is of somebody like on a bucking horse or somebody who’s driving a horse-drawn carriage, and the horse somehow gets out of control.
And so the phrase has been around since at least World War I, and there have been lots of versions of it, like “hold her, Newt, she’s heading for the pea patch,” or “hold her, Newt, she’s a rarin’,” or “she’s headed for the barn.”
The idea, again, is to hold that horse’s reins so that it gets back into control.
It sounds really interesting, even when you say it, because it has such a southern…
Yeah.
It’s often been used to represent rustic speech.
Sometimes it’s a part of jokes or anecdotes where people are trying to portray how they see rural folks.
Yeah, like a country bumpkin.
Yeah, it always comes with a certain tinge of country or southern or something like that.
It’s not the kind of thing that a city slicker would ever say.
Nucle is just like a stand-in name for any kind of like a generic farmer’s name?
It has been used in the past for dolt or idiot.
Yeah, it’s true.
Yeah.
Holder Newt.
Occasionally, it’s usually spelled N-E-W-T, but occasionally people have reinterpreted it as K-N-U-T or K-N-U-T-E.
But N-E-W-T is the original and the most common.
Wow.
Yeah?
What do you think?
But we don’t really have an origin story for it.
That’s the best that we’ve got.
We just know that it’s about 100 years old.
Okay.
Yeah, that’s great.
I just, one of those things that my dad and his dad would always say, and I was really curious about, and listening to your show, and I thought, you know, I’m going to call them and ask what this means.
So thanks for having me on the show.
Thanks for calling, Heather. We really appreciate it.
Thanks for joining us.
Take care now.
Take care.
Bye.
By the way, it was common enough by the 1940s that Dr. Seuss, who you may not know, but he actually did political cartoons for a while, did a political cartoon in 1942 that included the expression “Holder Newt.”
Oh, really?
So it’s the kind of thing that you might at one point have expected people to understand if you put it in the newspaper.
-huh.
Yeah.
And I love the image of a Dr. Seuss illustration of that.
There it is.
It’s classic Seuss, right?
Yes.
With this horse going wild and a strange-looking vehicle being pulled behind.
And they’re like soaring over a chimney in a house.
And she is definitely out of inflation.
Her in this story.
Oh, it’s inflation.
Yeah.
So hold her new.
Oh, my gosh.
Holding inflation during World War II.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That’s great.
That’s great.
We should put a link to that on our website.
Yeah, we’ll do that.
It’s actually in the library of the University of California, San Diego.
Excellent.
