Jesse from Newport News, Virginia, asks about potato quality, slang for an image or gadget that seems conspicuously bad. Online, recorded with a potato has appeared for at least a decade in YouTube comments about a heavily pixelated or otherwise blurry video, as if the camera itself were a potato. By 2012, potato quality was showing up for images too. The joke also fits old electronics called a potato, perhaps a reference to using a potato in an improvised battery. It plays well with related insults like recorded with a toaster or recorded with a microwave. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of ““Potato Quality” Means Blurry or Pixelated Videos and Images”
Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Jesse calling from Newport News, Virginia.
Hi, Jesse. Welcome to the show.
Hi, thanks for having me.
What can we do for you, Jesse?
I was wondering about a term I heard a lot, particularly online, something being potato quality or referring to it being bad quality.
What were you looking at?
Well, it’s something that I just kind of hear in slang, like, you know, something being,
Oh, did you take that picture with a potato?
Or, you know, maybe if computer’s old, it could be like you couldn’t run something because
Your computer’s a potato.
So pictures in particular?
Yeah, pictures in particular.
So we’re talking about pictures where they’re heavily pixelated or something?
Yeah.
Or just something maybe referring to like old electronics.
Okay. And the phrase specifically is potato quality, or you mentioned a computer that’s not very good and you just call that a potato?
Yeah, both actually. So you would say something like, here’s a photograph of me, but it’s kind of potato quality?
Mm-precisely.
Yeah, well, for at least a decade, the phrase recorded with a potato has been in YouTube comments, you know, where people are talking about something that Grant was describing earlier, an image that’s blurry or pixelated.
And the notion is, you know, as if you had used a camera made out of a potato to record it.
Yeah, that’s what I always thought of.
It kind of made me think of like a potato battery clock or something like that.
Right.
Right. A lot of people think that.
Yeah. Now, have you made one of those, a potato battery clock, I have to ask?
No, I actually never did. I’ve seen them a lot on television shows.
I know. I’ve always wanted to do that, you know, where you stick the wires and the nails in the potato and you can power a little digital clock.
But, yeah, potato quality recorded with a potato is often seen in YouTube comments as well as other just improbable objects like toasters or microwaves, people might say, recorded with a toaster.
And it goes back to just online jargon like that.
So it does only go back like 10 years or so?
As far as I know.
I looked into it in 2012.
I found it first in images and then later noticed it had been in videos.
And by 2012, it started showing up as the phrase potato quality.
And I started seeing it with images.
And so a lot of times what happens is people steal videos and images from each other and they re-upload them.
And when you re-upload them, they lose quality because there’s a recompression.
And when you recompress something, there’s something called lossiness.
Artifacts.
Yeah, artifacts.
You lose pixels.
And so you just get this lumpiness.
And I always think of it as kind of looks like it’s mashed potatoes.
Oh, that’s interesting.
Some of these images have been passed around for almost 20 years, and people are still re-uploading them for karma on Reddit.
It’s just ridiculous.
Of course.
So potato quality really does apply.
You put a pad of butter on them, you could eat them almost.
Oh, my gosh.
Indeed.
Well, thanks for taking my call.
Sure.
Yeah.
Glad to talk with you, Jesse.
All right.
Take care.
You too.
All right.
Bye-bye.
