WORDS: Boot

The first technical word I learnt when faced with a PC was boot. I felt quite a thrill as I explained to colleagues that I hadn't booted up yet, but I had no idea why this process, involving much winking of lights, should have been called booting, though everyone knew that more primitive machines like radios and televisions would sometimes respond to a judicious kick.

I should have guessed that boot is short for bootstrap, a term first used by programmers 50 years ago, the idea being that the machine seemed to defy gravity by doing the business all by itself. It's a pretty brutal word. "Boots" was the name for the lad in hotels who did the polishing when most ladies and gentlemen wore boots, and bootboys were more likely to be putting the boot in outside football grounds in the 1970s.

"To boot" as in "He's a wealthy man and generous to boot", and Milton's "Alas, what boots it..." etc, has nothing to do with footwear. Boot in this sense is from a word meaning remedy, gain, or profit, and is related to better; "generous to boot" means "as a bonus". Etymologists are cagey about booty's origins, but I doubt if this worried the bootleggers who hid their booty in their boots.

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