Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (3)
Sofa potato?
This is a little hard to admit, but I’ve never really known the difference between a sofa and a couch.
That’s pretty bad for someone who’s the upholstery editor of a furniture industry trade newspaper.
Mostly I say sofa because the industry says sofa, and advertises that way. And it really sounds a little more sophisticated and up-to-date.
But much of the real world seems to prefer couch. For instance, couch seems to be the preferable noun used in the classifieds, in real conversations, in movies and on TV (except for HGTV, of course). And how many times have you heard “sofa potato?”
Well?
So what’s the difference between a sofa and a couch? “About $100,” according to one wag. But that’s not the answer I was looking for.
So I turned to the wisdom of the Internet, and found several plausible answers and a few interesting comments.
This, from the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va.:
“A couch is very similar to a sofa. Derived from Middle French, couche, a couch is an article of furniture for sitting and reclining. Sofa, taken from the Arabic suffah, is a long upholstered seat usually with arms and a back.” And for good measure, “A settee is a long seat with a back or a medium-sized sofa … A chaise lounge, French in origin, is a long reclining chair.”
This should take you back in time: Remember when your grandmother called it a “divan?” Does anybody know what that is? And is it true that a sofa seats four, a couch three? Let me know.
The difference may all be sociolinguistics, what you grew up hearing. One generation calls it a divan, another a couch, another a sofa. What ever you call it, you better get your feet off it when your mother tells you.
Rockaway Beach Missouri commented:
My dad used to call our couch a "davenport".
Thomas Prais commented:
How close to home! One of the hardest--no, scratch that--the hardest thing for me to get used to when I joined this industry was the need to relearn how to speak about everyday things. Suddenly, there was no such thing as couches. . . they had all been replaced, mysteriously, perhaps in the night by elves, with sofas. Appearently, back in the day, a couch referred to what we would now, more or less, describe as a day bed, something described by Charles Boyce in his Dictionary of Furniture as a "type of upholstered bench with a headrest and a half-back." But language changes, usage is king, and if you sit on it and it's bigger than a love seat, for most people, it's a couch. I've also learned that there's no such thing as furniture, having been replaced with something called Home Furnishing Solutions (though as I found last time I moved, Home Furnishing Solutions are as every bit as heavy and cumbersome as their predeccesors). Perhaps, someday, we will skip the Furniture Store and visit a Home Furnishings Solutions Enclosed Multi-Dimensional Product-Provider/Consumer Transaction Interface Center to purchase, not lamps--we'll no longer have lamps--but Vertically Oriented Solar Spectral Emmissions Simulator. And what a bright day that'll be. I know some of this is just business jargon--always a bad thing. And some of it's marketing (we don't sell furniture, we sell solutions)--sometimes a bad thing. But even in terms of marketing, I wonder if it doesn't just alienate and confuse. What on-the-floor salesman, after all, when a customer comes in asking about couches, would begin the hoped-for transaction with, "I'm sorry, we do not stock couches, here. But if you like, I can show you many a fine specimen of sofas"? If it doesn't work on the salesfloor, will it really work in circulars and radio spots?
doug brackett commented:
Ever hear the old saw: "a difference without a distinction?" What we have here.
eNEWSLETTERS
OTHER HOME FURNISHING SITES
