What’s in a word?

Posted on | May 8, 2009 |

Browsing the news the other day I heard that the US Navy had deployed some destroyers to the Straits of Hormuz. This got me thinking of the word ‘destroyer’. Possibly it was because I’d been reading Leslie Marmon Silko’s wonderful novel Ceremony, in which she characterizes the white settlers who drove the Indians off their lands as being bewitched by the destroyer impulses of the world. Read it, if you want to go deep into the human psyche.

By definition a destroyer is a device whose only purpose is to destroy; not to protect or defend, but to destroy and mangle enough of whatever is out there until it has fulfilled its purpose. In a strange reversal of Darwinism its task is not to survive long enough to reproduce, and thus be ’successful’, but rather it becomes successful by destroying more material than itself before it, too, is transformed into wreckage.

This is surely no surprise to anyone. But the question I’d like to ask is, how did we, as a species, get ourselves to the point where we regard such thinking as acceptable and normal? How is it that one of ‘our’ boats is termed a ‘destroyer’ and we all feel this is a good thing? We don’t call our police ‘incarcerators’ do we?

We define ourselves to ourselves by our language. If I decide to define myself as ‘a miserable failure’ I’ll start to feel like one, no matter how happy and successful I might be. And if I accept the words I’ve chosen to describe myself I’ll most likely follow the path of other ‘failures’ by sustaining health problems and subsiding to a premature death. Words we tell ourselves make us what we are. And presently we’re a set of people who seem to feel that ‘destroyers’ are a good idea, and a good place to quarter our sons and daughters.

I’m all for defense, of course, and I like my military to be ready for it because it’s a world that has a few rather unpleasant dangers in it. But the term ‘destroyer’ worries me. As my mother used to say, ‘Watch your language’.

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