Technology and the internet

Twenty-ninth on this list is reiniciar, in experimenta reiniciar o computador, and the Portuguese word says plainly what it does: re in front of iniciar, begin again, with nothing hidden in it. The English instruction beside it is another matter, because the boot in « reboot » is a real boot, the kind with laces. In nineteenth-century American English the phrase to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps named a plain impossibility: nobody rises off the ground by tugging at the straps of his own boots. Engineers took that joke literally in the nineteen-fifties, because it describes exactly the difficulty a computer faces when the power comes on — it must run a program in order to load its programs, and it has nothing loaded to run. The small routine written to break that circle was called the « bootstrap », and « bootstrap » was soon clipped to « boot ». So one language names the outcome and the other keeps a piece of frontier humour about an impossible lift, which is also why « restart » survives beside it for the ordinary case, where nothing has to raise itself at all.