Although its primary purpose is structural, newels have long been adorned with decorative trim and designed in different architectural styles.
[8] A loose ball cap finial on the newel post at the base of the stairway is a plot device in the 1946 classic It's a Wonderful Life.
The same is used in jest in the 1989 film Christmas Vacation, in which Clark Griswold, in an emotional meltdown, cuts a loose finial off a newel post with a chainsaw.
Stewie then asks if the “baluster” is the big, round thing at the bottom of the stairs where the staircase begins, to which Brian laughs at him and corrects him by saying “I believe what you are referring to is a newel post”.
The comedy duo Nichols and May performed a routine about a frustrating attempt to obtain operator assistance from a trio of unhelpful telephone operators, the first of whom uses a bizarre phonetic alphabet to clarify the spelling of the requested name, where "newel post" represents the letter N: "'K' as in 'knife'; 'A' as in 'aardvark'; 'P' as in 'pneumonia'; 'L' as in 'luscious'; 'A' as in 'aardvark' again; 'N' as in 'newel post', Kaplan?"