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. In common usage, “couch potato” has always been a derogatory phrase that implies a misdirection of one’s passions. “Television!” he cries, invoking it as a sort of multiheaded deity.
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One of the more famous Halloween episodes of “The Simpsons,” from 1994, reimagines “The Shining” for the slacker generation, replacing the deranged mantra of “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” with “No TV and no beer make Homer go crazy.” Homer’s murderous rage is quelled only when he is shown a small, handheld television set. When Darlene morosely asks what she should buy, Roseanne loses her temper: “I don’t know! Go try to find something to blend in with the couch.”) And then there was Homer Simpson, the quintessential TV junkie. (Hoping to draw her out of her stupor, Roseanne gives Darlene money for new clothes. As Katey Sagal, who played Peg Bundy on “Married with Children,” told the actress and talk-show host Sara Gilbert in 2013, her character was, from the beginning, written as “ sort of a couch potato” the bouffant wig was Sagal’s way to “doll her up.” Gilbert herself played a much bleaker version of repose in “Roseanne,” when her character, Darlene, hit a period of teen-age angst, developing a sudden habit of spending hours on end watching television. They became a sitcom trope, suggesting that a fundamental lethargy, rather than a tireless Protestantism, lay at the center of the national personality.
In the ensuing years, couch potatoes of all varieties stretched out across the American cultural imagination. These were embodied in the figure of the “guilty, secretive viewer watching TV in private while denouncing it in public.”
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Though full of puns and ironic triumphalism, the lighthearted book betrays the social anxieties that surrounded television. Then, in 1983, Armstrong and the writer Jack Mingo published “The Official Couch Potato Handbook,” a mock guide, very much of its time, to slouching proudly in front of the boob tube. According to an interview that Iacino gave to Bon Appétit in 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. 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. Why, I wondered, did the harvest dwindle? Was the couch potato going the way of the bedpresser, or was it already gone?
After a steady increase in written usage between 19, “couch potato” peaked just after the millennium and then began to fall sharply. A later search of Google Ngram Viewer, which charts the appearance of words and phrases in books, supported my suspicion. On reflection, there did seem to be fewer couch potatoes lazing around than there used to be. It struck me then that this question revealed more than a gap in one young person’s vocabulary. No one could divine the real meaning-“a heavy, lazy fellow.” Trying to be helpful and contemporary, I said that a bedpresser was like a couch potato. Another ventured, with a surprising degree of confidence, that it was someone who pushed beds around in the streets. To have the yux is to have the hiccups, and a fopdoodle is “a fool, an insignificant wretch.” Then we came to the word “bedpresser.” One student guessed that it referred to a prostitute, though she put it less delicately. 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. Between 17, Samuel Johnson compiled his famous dictionary there. The museum is a wonderful eighteenth-century oddity in an otherwise mock-Georgian square, a place devoted to the joys of language. ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS PHILPOTĮarlier this year, I took my American study-abroad students on a tour of Dr. The sloth of the eighties and nineties has been digitally reformatted as ceaseless consumption.
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