Once an object of pity, the drone is now a whirring contraption to be feared

The landing of a drone marked with a radioactive stamp on the Japanese prime minister’s house this week serves to highlight the tremendous image makeover a single word in the English language has made in the past few decades.

Time was when the ‘drone’ was an object of pity, rather than fear or revulsion. As male bees that can make no honey, drones had historically and biologically been condemned to lifelong drudgery in service of the queen bee in the hive with no hope of even a sting operation to liven things up. The fictional Bertie Wooster presided over a brief upswing in the drones’ fortunes when his eponymous club was the scene of many a meaningless upper-class high jinks. It also hit a high of another kind when the word became the slang for a certain class of drugs. But even that did not give drones the kind of notoriety that it has got now.

As the popular term for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), preprogrammed drones are now the super creatures of the firmament, on demand not only to deliver bombs to terrorist-ridden locales but also courier packages to suburbia — and register protests in high circles. Indeed, given their sheer versatility, they should at least have an avatar in the next instalment of The Avengers, whose team of superheroes has been on a recruiting spree anyway.