Couch potato
Couch Potato ( ) (from the US slang ) is the stereotype of a person who a lot of their free time on a sofa or a chair with TV , junk food -Eat and drink beer spends. The term has a negative connotation . This cliché also includes the fact that couch potatoes are overweight and generally unkempt in appearance. An example is the US cartoon character Homer Simpson from the series The Simpsons .
Word origin
In the mid-1970s, a friend of American cartoonist Robert D. Armstrong came up with the idea of founding an association for lazy people in response to what he believed to be the excessive health and fitness fanatics of his day. For fun, they decided to call their group Couch Potatoes and created a picture of a potato lying on the sofa, constantly “watching TV”. Armstrong had this term protected and began to market the potato with T-shirts with images of the “couch potato” and the motto “Sic Semper Potatum Reclinus”. He was also the co-author and illustrator of The Official Couch Potato Handbook . Gradually the word crept into the English language and was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1993. In a figurative sense, the term also denotes people who lack initiative and who are difficult to inspire for an exertion or challenge, especially not for physical activities.
Mouse-Potato is a variation for someone who spends all of his time in front of the computer .
See also
Web links
- The Potato Museum - cartoons and explanations (engl.) ( Memento of 21 May 2008 at the Internet Archive )
- Explanations for this term in the Urban Dictionary
- Couch potatoes may have smaller brains later in life. On: eurekalert.org of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, February 10, 2016