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So, the irate caller to the San Francisco Chronicle's complaint line was not wrong, on the face of
it. Although he has become an instant cult hero (YouTube remixes, ringtones) for his chanting
critique of the Chron's editorial style, the merits of his case are limited.

Drones are not just pilotless airplanes, as he points out, but also male bees. In fact, in
Webster's that's the first definition, followed by "one that lives on the labors of others : parasite,"
and finally, in third place, unmanned aircraft. Fourth is "drudge." So, the term is ambiguous.
The qualifier "pilotless" does make it clear that we're talking about aircraft here, and is thus not
totally inappropriate.

However, arguing the other side, the editor was guilty of a behavior that George Lakoff of
Berkeley might describe as accepting a ready-made "frame" from elsewhere without examining
its components. Linguistic frames, phrases made up of terms glued together and fed to
unsuspecting readers or listeners, are highly important and subtle elements of propaganda.
One of Lakoff's prime examples is "embryonic stem cell research," a phrase that the Republican
National Committee made sure to send out whole thousands of times. Although there is
nothing "embryonic" about the stem cell research in question, the RNC could declare victory
when the New York Times came to use the phrase commonly in its entirety in editorial copy,
thus penetrating the liberal camp with a radically far right worldview by means of an apparently
innocuous phrase.

In the "drone" case, the result is harmless. The term pilotless serves mostly to clarify which sort
of drone. But as the NPR reporter who covered the Chron's story pointed out, there are
hundreds of thousands of instances of the phrase "pilotless drone" floating around on the Web.
People have stopped asking whether those two words belong together in every instance.

Watch out for those frames! Are all those "communist insurgent rebels" really communist,
insurgent, or rebellious? Are all those "noble freedom fighters" really so noble, and do they fight
for freedom or the spoils of war?

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