(Photo: "Check Reset," shot at the Computer History Museum by Flickr user Kreg Steppe, who hosts the Technorama podcast.)
The latest "On Language" item from New York Times columnist William Safire ponders the difference between the words "restart," "reboot," and "reset." Mr. Safire contacted me for my opinion on how the words are different, and I kind of went nuts thinking about it for a day. I asked friends and Twitter-pals for their thoughts, too, and after thinking and talking about it for a day, emailed a short reply which is mentioned in this piece. Anyway, the whole column is interesting, here's a snip:
Bemoaning "a dangerous drift in relations" between Russia and the NATO nations, Vice President Joe Biden told a conclave on security policy in Munich, "To paraphrase President Obama, it's time to press the reset button."
At C.I.A. headquarters in Virginia less than two weeks later, on Feb. 19, Biden paraphrased again: "The president has made it clear that he wants to hit the reset button on our relations with Russia."
Just short of two weeks after that repeated indirect quotation, President Obama publicly embraced and extended the metaphor attributed to him: "We've had a good exchange between ourselves and the Russians. I've said that we need to reset or reboot the relationship there."
The reset button had been pressed, hit or punched into politics on a grand scale in world newspaper coverage of Obama's upset victory over Senator Hillary Clinton and the rest of the Democratic field in the 2008 Iowa Democratic caucus. On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, London's Evening Standard reported, "She has tried to hit the reset button and radically change her strategy." She adopted that figure of speech every time her campaign shifted gears, to no avail.
Not surprising, then, on her first European tour as secretary of state, Clinton told NPR in Brussels that in discussions with the Russians, "we're going to hit the reset button and start fresh." She went so far as to present Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, with a red desk ornament representing a reset button, and they both merrily pressed it in a photo-op. Her gag gift was labeled in Russian as peregruzka, supposedly meaning "reset," but actually meaning "overcharge" — in the sense of "electrical overload," not meaning "gouging the unsuspecting consumer" — but the American mistranslation gave the Russian diplomat a chance for a sly dig.
Reset Button (New York Times. Special thanks to everyone who replied on Twitter!)
