Why Do We Call Someone a 'Couch Potato'?

Call someone a couch potato, and you’re implying that they spend a significant amount of their time sitting on their couch watching television. In more general terms, of course, couch potato might be used more loosely as a nickname for someone who just doesn’t pull their fair share of weight or put in their fair share of effort, or else is just generally lazy, inactive, or overly attached to their home comforts. But why call them a “potato”? And why, for that matter, refer to their “couch”? COUCH POTATO ORIGINSRetro living room with a TV and a lamp atop a wooden desk | subjug/GettyImagesWell, oddly, the etymology behind this particular slangy 20th-century expression rests on another entirely different slangy 20th-century expression, coined around two decades earlier. Television sets have been colloquially known as “tubes” since the 1950s. That name refers to the actual funnel-shaped cathode-ray tube, or vacuum “picture tube,” that was the major working component found inside many early televisions. Inside an early TV, the solid glass screen was coated in light-emitting bodies called phosphors, which glow when struck with a beam of electrons. As the television signal enters the back of the TV, the cathode emits a stream of electrons and fires them at the inside of the screen, causing these phosphors to light up and ultimately to produce a picture on the inside of the glass. Modern televisions with their lightweight flat screens, LEDs and high-definition pictures have long since abandoned this rather clunky, heavy, and cumbersome glass technology, of course, but the nickname “tube” has stuck around. And, in the late 1950s, it also inspired another nickname for the television—the “boob tube”—albeit this time implying that television watching isn’t perhaps the best use of a person’s time. Based on the notion that watching television might turn someone into a doltish “boob,” the nickname boob tube was first used for a TV set back in 1959. Someone who watched a lot of television themselves, meanwhile, might be labeled a “boob tuber.” And from there, it was only an etymological hop, skip, and a jump to calling this television-loving “tuber” a “potato.” AN EXTENSION OF THE 'BOOB TUBER' Lazy man with the remote and chips on the couch | lukas_zb/GettyImagesSupposedly invented as a punning extension of a boob tuber, the term couch potato—alongside all manner of other versions and interpretations, like “couch tattie” or “couch tater”—was first recorded in 1976. (The additional detail of the couch, meanwhile, clearly implies that a habitual television viewer naturally spends a lot of time sitting on their sofa at home.) From there, the term seems quickly to have caught on, and while both boob tube and boob tuber have perhaps fallen by the wayside, the couch potato remains still in use in the 21st century. Read More: