Etymology: “Hitting the Reset Button”
my first reset button
While it’s still only September, 2009 appears to be the year of “the reset button“. Someone left you a mess that you’ve now gotta clean up? Your initial approach didn’t fare so well? Made some mistakes that you don’t want to look at anymore? Well, it might just be time to hit, press, or push the reset button.
I spent some time looking at how this expression morphed from its humble industrial beginnings (e.g. hitting the reset button on a furnace, etc.) to a popular panacea prescribed by politicians and pundits alike (e.g. hitting the reset button on the healthcare debate).
More after the jump…
If we look at newswire, we immediately find that hitting the reset button is now popular — and bipartisan — prescription. Here’s some samples from the 113 times it was used yesterday:
Here’s GOP House leader John Boehner:
It’s time for the President to hit the reset button and work with Republicans for better solutions, before more debt is piled on our children and more American jobs are destroyed.
And Democratic strategist Mark Penn:
“He can hit the reset button and get bigger. His ability to get bigger is the way out of this,” the strategist continued. “You are not going to sell something this big and transformative on an individual self-interested basis.”
And not just with the Federal Government. It’s popular at the local level, too.
“We’ve had to hit the reset button in nearly every category,” [town manager John] Kross said. “The challenging part is we still are growing. There are still demands we have to meet.”
And, of course, in sports, where it’s prescribed for flagging teams at all levels:
After getting blanked by county rivals North, the Wolverines need to hit the reset button.
Considering they drubbed the Class AA Tigers 77-30 in Cumming last year, you’d think this would a gimme for West.
According to Google News, the expression has been trending for some time (probably due to the introduction of lots more electronic items with “reset buttons”), but there’s been a pretty significant spike in the first 6 months (or so) of 2009. And most of those instances are figurative, not literal. In the small sample I looked at (Google News docs from April and May 2009 retrieved by the query
+(push or hit or press) "the reset button"
just about 90% of instances weren’t actually making reference to a real-life, physical reset button.
So, what’s the deal? Where did this expression come from? And why is it so popular now?
First of all, objects with reset buttons — especially in an industrial setting — have been around for a long time. But it looks like reset buttons first came into public consciousness with the advent of automatic bowling alleys. Here’s the Hartford Courant from August 28, 1948:
If the bowler scores a strike on his first ball he merely pushes the reset button for a new set up.
And that’s pretty much the way things stayed until the early 1980s. But then a funny thing happened: reset buttons started appearing on those new-fangled computers, arcade games, and most importantly, home video game consoles. Almost immediately, people started realizing that if you don’t like the game you’re playing, salvation is only a button away.
Here’s the earliest example I could find, from the Chicago Tribune from April 22, 1982:
And if it doesn’t work, you push the reset button and start again. Unfortunately, real live war doesn’t have a reset button.
Heck, video games even encouraged you to flush your cares away via the reset button:
If you win, portions of their clothing disappear and they plead with you to push the reset button to start the game over. [Providence Journal, October 19, 1986]
The first figurative usages of this expression seem to have appeared in sports articles. Here’s the earliest figurative use I could find on Google News, from the St. Louis Post Dispatch from June 16, 1988:
Now it’s time to push the reset button [on the Cardinals' season] and start over. ”It’s not over by any means, but we’ve got to start creating the breaks and playing out of our minds.”
It’s not surprising that this figurative use appeared first with sports — especially right around the time that sports video games really got established as a mainstay of the video game industry. The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) came out in 1986, just about the same time as now-legendary sports titles such as Double Dribble (1987), Blades of Steel and Nintendo’s Ice Hockey (both 1988), andTecmo Bowl (1987) were becoming popular with fans.
The expression remained pretty much the province of sports docs until the late 1990s. The first non-sports figurative usage that I could find stems from 1991, this time from the July 1 issue of BusinessWeek. (Interestingly enough, this reference was made for a tech-savvy crowd.)
Dunlap may have to hit the reset button on his dreams of building Go-Video into a force within consumer electronics.
By 1993, the expression was hitting the public consciousness — even appearing in an Iron City Beer commercial. It still was associated with gamers (=”losers”), who were still perceived as non-mainstream. From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from March 2, 1991:
The kicker is, “Hey losers, hit the reset button,” meaning that the … Hit the reset button.”
Despite growing awareness with gaming and computer hardware, non-sports, non-gaming, figurative uses still remained relatively rare until the mid 2000s.
We’re left to wonder: what caused the recent spike? A more Internet-savvy media? (Probably not, as usage doesn’t seem to follow the increased coverage of Internet- and computer-related topics that began in 1997.) Younger journalists who grew up on videogames? (This may be more likely, but I don’t have any data linking age with usage.)
Or just a spate of recent events which have made us want to start all over?
“He can hit the reset button and get bigger. His ability to get bigger is the way out of this,” the strategist continued. “You are not going to sell something this big and transformative on an individual self-interested basis.”