Turnip Trucks and Katie Bar the Door....Where'd they come from??

This site has some great explanations of things like this...

http://www.word-detective.com

Of Turnips and Trucks

Dear Evan: I've heard the phrase "I didn't just fall off of the turnip truck" used in similiar situations as "I wasn't born yesterday." I used the "turnip truck" phrase with some friends who had never heard it. That prompted mindless speculation on the origin of the phrase. Do you know how the phrase came about? Thanks. -- Dave Rouse, via the Internet.

First, let me take a moment to caution you and your friends. "Mindless speculation" is a very delicate and potentially dangerous endeavor best left to trained professionals. Those of us who do it for a living have seen far too many cases of amateurs who set out to do a little innocent mindless speculating and wind up convincing themselves that "posh" is an acronym for "port out, starboard home." Don't let this happen to you.

Onward. I've never heard the particular phrase "I didn't just fall off of the turnip truck," but it certainly seems to be a good example of an entire class of catch phrases based on urban-rural rivalry. The thrust of such phrases is, of course, that "I am not a fool or a newcomer," and, in this case, that "I am not an ignorant country bumpkin who just arrived in the big city on a truck full of lowly turnips that I was dumb enough, on top of everything else, to fall off of." This image of a bewildered hayseed ripe for fleecing by urban con artists is a close relative of more general phrases used to assert one's "insider status" and thus intelligence or savvy. The United States being a nation largely composed of immigrants, it's not surprising that the all-time most commonly heard phrase of this type is "I didn't just get off the boat."

I don't think that the phrase you mention "came from" any particular incident or practice. Chances are that whoever thought it up was casting about for a metaphor for rural life, and the humorous image (as well as the alliteration) of "turnip truck" filled.

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Katie bar the door!

Dear Evan: My mother would say "It's Katie bar the door!" to describe someone's getting very angry. A man at the office suggested that pubs' doors were barred at closing time (or would you bar it to let no troublemakers in or out?). Any information on this one would be fun. -- Anne Ruthven, Bandera, Texas.

I hope you have a flexible definition of "fun," because, after searching through a dozen reference books, I have come up with only a sketchy answer to your question. I can tell you that "Katie bar the door" is a colloquial expression meaning "look out" or "get ready for trouble," and that it is heard primarily in the Southern United States. Beyond that, things get very murky. I even searched the Internet for an answer, but all I discovered about "Katie bar the door" on the Net is that the phrase may or may not -- opinions vary -- occur in the lyrics to an old REM song.

Eventually, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I realized that the best answer I was likely to find was in my own back yard all along. My parents, in their Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins <index.html>, report similar difficulty in tracing "Katie bar the door." In their case however, a helpful reader came to the rescue and noted that the phrase most probably came from an old English folk song. In the song, Katie and her husband are arguing, and somehow agree that the next one to speak will lose the argument. Since neither will speak to suggest barring the door at bedtime, robbers break in during the night and commit various outrages against the pair. The end of the song apparently involves the husband crying out at last and repelling the miscreants, thereby losing the argument with his wife. Since I don't have the actual lyrics to the song, I can only presume that the phrase "Katie bar the door" occurs as a refrain or concluding stanza, but the accepted meaning of the phrase certainly fits the story conveyed in the song.