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Comment by wtvanhest | Hacker News Reader

They probably should have continued using the letters. The more things called ISIS the less important those letters are to any one thing, including the terrorist org.

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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13967100 and marked it off-topic.

Yeah, that seems reasonable. This got way out of control.

The "terrorist org" never used those letters in the first place. The acronym in Arabic is "Daesh". ISIS is an English-language acronym formed from a (bad[1]) translation of the group's name. Think about it: why would a decidedly muslim organization name itself in a foreign language after a forgotten infidel goddess?

[1] Most western journalists rapidly moved off onto ISIL, which is a better translation (the name never referred to Syria the nation, but the geographical area better captured by "Levant"). Really only the right-wing sources continue to use "ISIS", presumably because it sounds more like a Bond villain's outfit.

Or in the case of the BBC, they use "The Islamic State group", or "the so-called Islamic State", as an effort of denying them any legitimacy as an actual state.

If we want to make them angry we should be calling them daesh.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/10/09/words-matter-...

Calling them a nasty name? Do you really think that's a mature and effective strategy in this situation?

Of course it shouldn't be the only thing we do, far from it, but as Sun Tzu said:

"If your opponent is of choleric temper, irritate him"

How many ISIS members do you think will read these comments?

IMHO, it is just childish, and to me, devalues someone's comments when they resort to insults. It's as if you were talking g about Trump or Clinton but referring to them as "idiot" rather than by name. It's simply unnecessary and shows clouded, emotional, judgement.

It is normal to translate acronyms. USA is EEUU in Spanish or EUA in Portuguese, for example.

I'm not contradicting you, just clarifying.

The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and offshoot Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) are additional examples.

>right-wing sources ISIS on youtube: 5.2 million ISIL on youtube: 0.6 million

> ISIS is an English-language acronym formed from a (bad[1]) translation of the group's name.

Former name; they dropped the geographical modifier years ago, and it's just (translated) “the Islamic State” now.

This actually happened a lot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_changes_due_to_the_Islami...

The name of the spy agency in the cartoon Archer, the International Secret Intelligence Service, also fell victim to this.

They handled that extremely well though - I can't recall the exact timing but ISIS was seemingly always on the verge of crumbling or being bought so they just sort of let it happen and the group made a seamless (if not painless) transition into ineffective drug dealers and bungling private investigators ("The Figgis Agency")

Anyone stumbling across this comment and wondering WTF we're talking about - definitely check out Archer, it's pretty great

Sure. NSA has plenty of resources to process and store all of them.

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