couch potato
a person who spends lots of time watching TV
STATISTICS
IN THE PRESS
COUCH POTATOES who start exercising in later life can still reduce the odds of heart disease, research finds.
(BBC)
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A new tourism campaign urges people not to become COUCH POTATOES this autumn but to get out into the English countryside.
(BBC)
(BBC)
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A new tourism campaign urges people not to become COUCH POTATOES this autumn but to get out into the English countryside.
(BBC)
Did you
know?
couch potato
noun, slang
- a lazy and inactive person; especially one who spends a great deal of time watching television
(Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary)
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WORD ORIGIN
In the mid-1970s, a friend of American cartoonist Robert Armstrong came up with the idea of forming an association of lazy people in response to what he felt was an overabundance of health and fitness fanatics. Just for fun, they decided to call the group "couch potatoes," creating an image of a vegetable sitting or lying on the couch constantly watching television.
Armstrong trademarked the term and began marketing novelty items like T-shirts with pictures of the couch potato emblazoned on the front and the motto "Sic Semper Potatum Reclinus." He also co-authored and illustrated a book "The Official Couch Potato Handbook", which is still in circulation. Armstrong made a decent living for quite a few years and in the process the term officially entered the English language (Merriam-Webster's officially dates it back to 1982, the Oxford English Dictionary added it in 1993).
The association was a male only club. But under pressure from their wives and girlfriends, they formed the "Couch Tomatoes" association under the motto "equal rights to the couch."
The negative image of the potato eventually prompted a response from a group in Massachusetts, which organised the Potato Anti-Defamation League. In 2005, the British Potato Council launched a campaign to combat what they thought was a false impression of the potato as unhealthy. They encouraged executives at the Oxford University Press, publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary, to eliminate the phrase "couch potato" and replace it with "couch slouch." The campaign was unsuccessful. As chief editor John Simpson pointed out, " When people blame words they are actually blaming the society that uses them. Dictionaries just reflect the words that society uses."
(source: The Potato Museum)
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SMUGGLE OWAD INTO TODAY'S CONVERSATION:
"Has TV turned us into a society of couch potatoes?"
noun, slang
- a lazy and inactive person; especially one who spends a great deal of time watching television
(Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary)
---
WORD ORIGIN
In the mid-1970s, a friend of American cartoonist Robert Armstrong came up with the idea of forming an association of lazy people in response to what he felt was an overabundance of health and fitness fanatics. Just for fun, they decided to call the group "couch potatoes," creating an image of a vegetable sitting or lying on the couch constantly watching television.
Armstrong trademarked the term and began marketing novelty items like T-shirts with pictures of the couch potato emblazoned on the front and the motto "Sic Semper Potatum Reclinus." He also co-authored and illustrated a book "The Official Couch Potato Handbook", which is still in circulation. Armstrong made a decent living for quite a few years and in the process the term officially entered the English language (Merriam-Webster's officially dates it back to 1982, the Oxford English Dictionary added it in 1993).
The association was a male only club. But under pressure from their wives and girlfriends, they formed the "Couch Tomatoes" association under the motto "equal rights to the couch."
The negative image of the potato eventually prompted a response from a group in Massachusetts, which organised the Potato Anti-Defamation League. In 2005, the British Potato Council launched a campaign to combat what they thought was a false impression of the potato as unhealthy. They encouraged executives at the Oxford University Press, publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary, to eliminate the phrase "couch potato" and replace it with "couch slouch." The campaign was unsuccessful. As chief editor John Simpson pointed out, " When people blame words they are actually blaming the society that uses them. Dictionaries just reflect the words that society uses."
(source: The Potato Museum)
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SMUGGLE OWAD INTO TODAY'S CONVERSATION:
"Has TV turned us into a society of couch potatoes?"
