How to Destruct the Language

Business Insider, in an August 1, 2020 article on the newly-arrived murder hornets, wrote “The WSDA reported that it plans to use infrared cameras and additional traps to catch living hornets in order to track and destruct these insects’ colonies.”

I don’t know how you react to that language, but I stopped dead in my tracks and stared at the word “destruct”, used there as a verb, or action word.

“Holy cow,” I thought to myself, “is nothing sacred? Forget the murder hornet and concentrate on this other nasty invasive species.” And as I write this, I’m happy to report that spellcheck doesn’t like “destruct”, either. I’m also pleased to note that the original WSDA website used the term “eradicate”. Some people can still talk good. Or goodly.

We all know that there exists a perfectly good word for wrecking something, and that is “destroy”. If you cause the destruction of something, you destroy it, you don’t destruct it.

“Destruct” as a verb is obviously a back-construction from “self-destruct” which is a relatively new, but perfectly acceptable, verb. And to be sure, “destruct’s” brethren such as construct, obstruct, and instruct have been honest citizens for centuries. You’d be shocked to hear “constroy”, “obstroy”, or “instroy”.

English words of Latin origin sometimes made their way into our language directly from scholarly or ecclesiastical sources, and sometimes second-hand through Norman French. Occasionally, linguistic siblings took different paths and ended up different in appearance.

Like the tax and business-law verb “to gift”, “to destruct” probably came into our language through professional jargon, this time likely military, and its usage is not new in those circles.

Purists often react to these things as “There goes the neighbourhood!” I’m usually firmly in that camp for an hour or so, but then I get over it. English is nothing if not the most fluid and rapidly-evolving major language in the world, and we perpetually have to negotiate that imprecise boundary between the careless and the stuffy.

But let it not fall to me to destruct the English language.

(I’m counting on a fair amount of feedback on this one!)