Fix corrupted terminal output

[Chris St Denis]

Occasionally, I accidentially cat a binary file or a directory casing 
the terminal output to be corrupted with text looking like (don't know 
if this will make it through the mail cleanly)

    E???? ??? ?? ?????????.
    ????2#


To fix this normally I just close the window and open a new ssh 
connection, but I am wondering if there is a more clean way to do this. 
I've tried reset(1), but it doesn't seem to help any.