(MOWS poh.tay.toh)
n.
A person who spends a lot of time at the computer (cf. couch potato).
Example Citation:
Log onto the World Wide Web, type in the address www.superbowl.com, and you enter a football fantasyland featuring equal amounts of statistics, hype, commercialism and cutting edge Internet technology.
By combining their considerable resources, the National Football League, NBC and software powerhouse Microsoft have created a Web site that in its unabashed worship of excess rivals the Super Bowl itself.
There's a complete history of the 30- year-old event, memorable plays of the past, and everything you could possibly want to know about the Cowboys and the Steelers.
It's enough to turn a diehard football fan into a mouse potato, planted in front of a PC, beer in lap.
—David Einstein, "Super Bowl's tangled Web," The San Francisco Chronicle, January 24, 1996
Notes:
This word appeared originally in Gareth Branwyn's Jargon Watch column, in the January 1994 issue of Wired magazine. (Original definition: "The online and interactive-TV generation's answer to the couch potato.") In an e-mail to the American Dialect Society, Gareth notes that the writer Alice Kahn appears to have coined mouse potato in 1993 (a refererence to her as coiner appears in a message to The Well BBS on September 11, 1993).
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