reboot

Boot comes from Old French bote, meaning footwear. The bootstrap — a loop attached to the back of a boot allowing the wearer to pull it on — gave rise to the idiom 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps,' describing impossible self-reliance. The problem with bootstraps, logically, is that you need to be standing to use them: you cannot lift yourself by pulling on something attached to yourself.

In the 1950s, computer engineers borrowed the bootstrap metaphor for the process by which a computer loads its own operating software. The computer starts with a tiny, hard-wired program that loads a slightly larger program that loads the full operating system — each stage lifting the machine higher, like a bootstrap. The shortening 'boot' appeared in technical documentation by the early 1970s.

Reboot — to boot again — entered computing vocabulary in the 1970s and early 1980s. The solution to most computer problems ('have you tried turning it off and on again?') reflects the reboot's quasi-magical power: clearing memory, closing hung processes, returning to a known state. The reboot was so reliable a solution that it became a cliché.

Today 'reboot' has left computing to mean any fresh start in any domain: a rebooted film franchise, a rebooted career, a rebooted relationship. The word has become a general metaphor for clearing accumulated problems and returning to first principles — the bootstrap logic applied to human affairs.