couche

Couch comes from Old French couche, from couchier (to lay down, to recline), from Latin collocāre (to place together, to arrange). The Latin root is the same one that gives English 'collocate.' A couch was not a specific piece of furniture. It was any place where a person could lie down. A bed was a couch. A grassy bank was a couch. The word named the act, not the object.

The furniture meaning solidified in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when European drawing rooms began to include long, upholstered seats designed for reclining. The French chaise longue (long chair) and the English couch occupied overlapping territory. A couch was distinguished from a settee by its lower back and the expectation that users would lie on it, not sit upright. Sitting upright on a couch was — and remains — slightly awkward.

Sigmund Freud placed his patients on a couch in Vienna starting in the 1890s, and the image became permanent. The analyst's couch. The casting couch. The psychiatrist's couch. The word acquired a psychological dimension it never had in French. To be 'on the couch' was to be examined, exposed, or exploited. Freud chose the couch because he did not want patients looking at him. The furniture's passivity became its symbolic function.

The compound 'couch potato' was coined in 1976 by Tom Iacino of Pasadena, California, as a play on 'boob tube' (television). The word that once described any resting place now evokes a specific image: a person horizontal, facing a screen, not moving. The Latin collocāre meant to arrange something carefully. The couch potato is the opposite of careful arrangement.