"A nod's as good as a wink to a blind horse" is one of those good old English phrases whose origins are murky, and whose meaning is generally well understood but perhaps not all it seems.
It is usually assumed to mean that a subtle signal is usually sufficient for someone who is open and ready to understand or undertake something. Thus, you can nod or wink or make any other small gesture: I will still understand your meaning.
To me, that doesn't really make any sense, although it does seem to be the most likely meaning of the earliest-known use of the phrase, dating back to William Goodall's 1740 ballad opera The False Guardians Outwitted.
It seems to me that perhaps that would make sense for the commonly-used shortened version of the phrase, "a nod's as good as a wink", but not when the "blind horse" is added in (or "blind bat", as Monty Python would have it). A blind horse can see neither the nod nor the wink, so each gesture is equally useless. So, to me, a better meaning would be: it doesn't matter how you present it, a person who is not ready or willing to understand will never take your meaning.
A Quora response by someone with a PhD in applied linguistics suggests that either meaning may be true, but the first meaning is probably more true (or more English, she suggests). Now, I'm no linguist, but I still disagree. Because, after all, a nod's as good as .... well, you know.
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