RAF MQ-9 Reaper, Afghanistan. Wikimedia Commons/Steve Follow. Some rights reserved.The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is a technology that begs an unusually large number of categorical ambiguities. The origin of its common name, ‘drone’, is seemingly self-evident: it is logical to make a connection between the musical drone and the low hum of a jet engine. This is not, however, the true etymology. Instead, the name ‘drone’ derives from that of the male honey bee, a bee that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “does no work but can fertilise the queen”, and which shares the black abdominal stripes used to distinguish the first UAVs. And yet, the bee also buzzes, its wings whirr. Regardless of the intended meaning, the UAV both is and does drone.
More than a conventional fighter jet, the experience of the drone – for those who, as a result of military campaigns waged predominantly by the US (in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia) and Israel (in Gaza), spend much of their lives with UAVs loitering in the skies above – is one characterised by the low, continuous thrum laden with the imminent potential for destruction and death.
If the lesson of this first phenomenon is to accept that it is the very nature of language to collide, for its words to flow into one another, throwing forth unforeseen meanings, then it is the lesson of a second similar blurring that at times such unintended consequences must be resisted in spite of their inevitability.
