For my most recent "Word on the Street" column in the Wall Street Journal, I consider the history of a word very much in the news: drone, referring to a pilotless aircraft guided by remote control. It turns out the term has been on a long, strange trip from early prototypes in the 1930s to the current controversial U.S. program of covert drone strikes.Continue reading...
In his recent thriller Our Kind of Traitor, John le Carré slips the A+ word sybarite into a description of the many sides of ingenue spy and literature professor Perry Makepiece.Continue reading...