When people hear the sound of a drone, explained one resident of Waziristan, “Children, grown-up people, women, they are terrified. In the accounts of people that the researchers interviewed, the sound of the drones was often invoked. The authors of the Stanford-NYU human rights report, Living Under Drones, which is so far the most comprehensive report on the civilian impact of drone warfare, found that the sound of drones has a profound impact on the mental health of civilians. In Gaza, where drones can be a constant presence, the machines are called zannanas, meaning a ‘bee’s buzz.’ Wasseem el Sarraj described them in an article in The New Yorkeras “patrolling prison guards,” explaining that “there is no escape, neither inside the house nor from the confines of Gaza.” “The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death,” writes David Rhode in The Drone War. For those who live in areas where drones are operational, their primary-and in some cases only-interaction of the drone is through sound. This is deeply ironic, because even though the drone’s etymological association with sound is coincidental, the sound of the drone is one of its most important features. Therefore the mechanical drone, which is so often erroneously thought to be named after its sound, was named after something that, by coincidence, was named for its sound. However, as a quick perusal of an etymology dictionary such as the Wordsworth Concise reveals, the original drone does take its name from “the droning sound it makes.” To be precise, the word “drone” originated from the Anglo Saxon word dræn, which means to hum. “The drone,” wrote a reader of the British Bee Journal, in a letter to the editors, which appeared in 1906, “was designed for a definite purpose.” In sacrificing his free will, and his life, writes the reader, the drone serves a noble cause, and therefore “ought to have his little niche in the Temple of Fame.” Like mechanical drones, drone bees work singularly and, arguably, mindlessly. In fact, pilotless aircraft are named for drone bees, which are male non-workers-hatched, it so happens, from unfertilized eggs-who serve a single purpose: to impregnate the queen, after which, they die. This little piece of untruth has been remarkably tenacious. There is a fallacy going around that the drone derives its name from the droning sound that it produces when it flies.
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