The "Nurse" (Remote Control), 1980s, by Richard West

From MemoryArchive

Who: Richard West
What: Nurse?
When: 1980s
Where: Home

In our house from my birth until I moved out, each of our remote controls was referred to as a "nurse". I noticed other families called them clickers, or remotes, or something else, so I figured that "nurse" was another acceptable name for it. I thought this until I referred to it as such at enough other people's houses to realize that no one in history had ever referred to a remote control as a nurse. At this point I lost faith in my parents as sources of reliable social information. I learned (when I was 20) that this term came from a sketch on Saturday Night Live (or some similar show) where a body-casted patient in a hospital is watching TV. Once the intro to that self-same show came on, the patient screamed for the nurse to come and change the channel. My parents adopted this habit in the house when something bad came on TV, until, over time, it became a general term for the remote control. Suddenly this strange and embarrassing family quirk became an interesting and endearing example of the linguistic change that I went on to study in my collegiate education.