{‘Potato!’ ‘Slouch!’ ‘Potato!’ ‘Slouch!’}
This “couch potato” story is getting a lot of attention, from blogs to actual news outlets (see Language Log, A Capital Idea, the Guardian, BBC). The Guardian printed on Monday:
British farmers have launched a campaign to remove the term “couch potato” from the dictionary because they fear its negative connotations are putting people off buying the vegetable.
The British Potato Council has written to the Oxford English Dictionary to ask for it to be taken out.
It has also planned demonstrations outside the offices of the Oxford University Press and in Parliament Square in London today to demand that it be replaced with the term “couch slouch”.
The argument is that potatoes are an “inherently healthy” food, according to a spokeswoman for the Council – and so “couch potato” mistakenly connotes the potato as unhealthy. I get their beef* with the term, but I guess the semantics of the term is a little different for me. I think of “couch potatoes” as being potato-esque because they just sit there in a stagnant blob, not moving – not because they’re somehow internally unhealthy. So, yeah, it could have been any food I suppose, since foods for the most part don’t themselves walk around or otherwise perform physical activity. Maybe it’s potato because they have eyes? Regardless, it’s a potato-like activity because it’s no activity at all, not because it’s void of nutrition. Am I making any sense here?
At any rate, this obviously isn’t going to work. Dictionaries don’t make language, people like the term, it’s silly to think that people wouldn’t be buying potatoes because of the term, etc. etc. But it is going to be hugely successful in spreading the word about potatoes being healthy, and this is the business move the industry has planned all along, I’m quite sure.
*Sadly, I cannot take credit for this pun – Mark Liberman at LL originated it in his post [link above], at least in this context and to my knowledge.
