(no subject)

[theweaselking]

Why you should say "Daesh", not "ISIS". And no, it's not because it means "to trample" or that it's an Arabic pun that means "bigot".

And so if the word is basically 'ISIS', but in Arabic, why are the people it describes in such a fury about it? Because they hear it, quite rightly, as a challenge to their legitimacy: a dismissal of their aspirations to define Islamic practice, to be 'a state for all Muslims’ and – crucially – as a refusal to acknowledge and address them as such. They want to be addressed as exactly what they claim to be, by people so in awe of them that they use the pompous, long and delusional name created by the group, not some funny-sounding made-up word. And here is the very simple key point that has been overlooked in all the anglophone press coverage I’ve seen: in Arabic, acronyms are not anything like as widely used as they are in English, and so arabophones are not as used to hearing them as anglophones are. Thus, the creation and use of a title that stands out as a nonsense neologism for an organisation like this one is inherently funny, disrespectful, and ultimately threatening of the organisation’s status.

It's just an accurate acronym that is, in context, dismissive, and mocking, and sounds a little ridiculous. Sort of like calling "friends of liberty" "the flibberty", or a group referring to themselves as "teabaggers" or "Canadian Reform Alliance Party".

The pronunciation is, apparently, a shortened one-syllable version of "da-esh" - or "daje" where the A is like in "awe". NB: The youtube video repeats the same claims that the above article debunks - but you can hear the pronunciation at least?