"Couch potato" was coined on July 15, 1976, when Tom Iacino, a member of the tongue-in-cheek California group the Boob Tubers, called his friend, cartoonist Robert Armstrong, and asked Armstrong's girlfriend, "Hey, is the couch potato there?" Then there's "meme", not born on the internet, but in Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene, where he defined it as a unit of cultural transmission, like a gene but for ideas. Dawkins shortened it from the Greek mimeme, meaning "imitated thing." Fifty years later, it mostly means a cat with a caption. (Source: Mental Floss)
Couch Potato turns 50 in 2026
