Why we should call it "Daesh" instead of "ISIS."

There are a bunch of things you could call the terrorist organization that kills so many innocent people and claims it's in the name of a God of peace. Most of them are unprintable. But right now, I mostly see it being called "ISIS", which is an acronym for "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria." But there are people who are starting to call it "Daesh" -- something like "Dah[glottal stop/ayin-sort-of-sound]--eesh". Which is an acronym for al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-'Eraq- wa al-Sham.

So, what's better about "Daesh" than "ISIS"? Aren't they the same thing? Well... on the surface, yes. But really, not so much.

See, the thing is -- in English, we do acronyms and initialisms a lot. It seems like you're not even allowed to start a government program or something until you've come up with a cool acronym for it. But in Arabic, not so much. "al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-'Eraq- wa al-Sham" sounds all impressive. "Daesh" sounds much less so. Sounds like of stupid, actually.

Plus, it sounds a lot like "daes", which means something like "squisher." It's not actually a form of the same word or anything, but it sounds a lot alike.

In English, "ISIS" sounds like "Isis", a goddess of the underworld. Not a good religious connotation, sure, but still pretty darned awesome. In Arabic "Daesh" sounds like you're trying to make wine. Much less awesome.

So: the tl;dr of why to use "Daesh" instead of "ISIS" is that "ISIS" sounds cool, and "Daesh" sounds pathetic -- and that, when your entire existence depends upon getting impressionable teenagers and young men to believe that you are cool enough to die for, making you sound pathetic genuinely hurts you.