Names have power.
They want us to call them ISIS, or the Islamic State. But they are not Islamic, nor a state. Arabs call them Daesh, an acronym of their Arabic name, and they hate it because it sounds like “an imposing bigot”, “one who sows discord” or “one who crushes things underfoot” from the verb دعس within the name.
This is their true name.
The French government has changed its official name for the group; Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said “I will be calling them the ‘Daesh cutthroats’.”
Let’s follow this example. Stop flattering them by calling them ISIS. Spite them by calling them Daesh, and help stop the division between Western and Middle East. Our battle is not with Arabs or Muslims, but with bigots who sow discord and crush others underfoot: Daesh.
Daesh it is.
It refuses to acknowledge their importance.
“So the insult picked up on by Daesh is not just that the name makes them sound little, silly, and powerless, but that it implies they are monsters, and that they are made-up.“
From this link right here; a piece about the word, the linguistics of it, and how anglophone media has gotten its origins, meaning, connotations wrong, and also about the importance of using Daesh instead of ISIS or ISIL. That was the most solid deconstruction of it I could find on short notice.
(Source: independent.co.uk)
