The old metaphor—vegetative, slothful, inert—is increasingly at odds with the jitteriness of digital life.
Earlier this year, I took my American study-abroad students on a tour of Dr. Johnson’s House, in London. The museum is a wonderful eighteenth-century oddity in an otherwise mock-Georgian square, a place devoted to the joys of language. Between 1748 and 1755, Samuel Johnson compiled his famous dictionary there. At the end of our tour, the guide gave us a quiz, to see whether we could work out the definitions of a handful of obsolete words. A flittermouse, we learned, is a bat.
The record states that the first couch potato was named and affectionately shamed in Pasadena, California, in 1976, when Tom Iacino phoned his friend Robert Armstrong, a cartoonist and TV lover. According to an interview that Iacinoin 2014, Armstrong’s girlfriend picked up, and Iacino said, “Hey, is the couch potato there?” Armstrong soon trademarked the unplanned coinage, with Iacino’s permission.
In common usage, “couch potato” has always been a derogatory phrase that implies a misdirection of one’s passions. It is therefore significant that, as we spend more time looking at our devices, the phrase that once criticized an equivalent attachment is in decline. This is partly the result of a kind of habitat destruction.
Indeed, it is the inertness of the potato metaphor that is most at odds with the jitteriness of digital life. The pistoning of thumbs and triple-lutzing of fingers has widely replaced our stupefied pressing of the up-down buttons on the remote. And, even when wewatching television on our devices, one eye is likely on the lookout for incoming notifications. A sudden urge to Google briefly turns the latest episode of “Transparent” into a radio play.
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