What’s in a word?

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 purpo