WHAT TO CALL ISLAMIC STATENov 15th 2015, 23:53 BY THE ECONOMISTHOURS AFTER France and America pledged to ramp up the war againstIslamic State (IS) in response to attacks in Paris that killed 129 and woundedmore than 350, French warplanes began pounding the groups stronghold in Raqqa,in north-eastern Syria. The operation was conducted in co-ordination withAmerican forces. The French and Americans seemed to be unified over the namethey are using for this terrorist scourge, too. Announcing strikes, the Frenchdefence ministry referred to a target used by Daish as a command post. BarackObama used the same term when he spoke, at a G20 leaders summit in Turkey, ofredoubling efforts to bring about a peaceful transition in Syria and toeliminate Daish as a force that can create so much pain and suffering forpeople in Paris, in Ankara, and in other parts of the globe. John Kerry, theAmerican secretary of state, also called IS Daish during a meeting inVienna. The group has variously been dubbed ISIS, ISIL, IS and SIC too. Why thealphabet soup?Part of the reason is that the group has evolved over time, changing itsown name. It started as a small but viciously effective part of the Sunniresistance to Americas 2003 invasion of Iraq, calling itself al-Qaeda in Iraq,or AQI. In 2007, following the death of its founder (and criticism fromal-Qaeda for being too bloodthirsty), AQI rebranded itself the Islamic State inIraq, or ISI. It suffered setbacks on its home turf, but as Syria descendedinto civil war in 2011 ISI spotted an opportunity. By 2013 it had inserteditself into eastern Syria and adopted a new name to match: the Islamic State inIraq and Syria (ISIS). Increasing the confusion, ISIS changed its name yetagain in June 2014, declaring itself the State of the Islamic Caliphate (SIC),a title that reflects its ambitions to rule over Muslims everywhere.Translation presents another opportunity for acronyms to flourish. Inits earlier incarnation as ISIS, the group had sought to challenge"colonialist" borders by using an old Arab geographicaltermal-Shamthat applies either to the Syrian capital, Damascus, or to thewider region of the Levant; hence the official American preference for callingit Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, rather than ISIS. The Arabicfor this, al-Dawla al-Islamiya fil Iraq wal-Sham, can be abbreviated to Daish,just as the Palestinian group Hamas (which means "zeal") is anacronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, or Islamic Resistance Movement.Daish is the name that has widely stuck among Arabs, although the groupsown members call it simply the State, al-Dawla, for short, and threaten withlashes those who use Daish. (Daish and Daesh are one and the same acronym inArabic, merely transliterated differently for the Roman script.)There is a long history of pinning unpleasant-sounding names onunpleasant people. Rather as the term Nazi caught on in English partly becauseof its resonance with words such as "nasty", Daish rollspleasurably off Arab tongues as a close cousin of words meaning to stomp,crush, smash into, or scrub. Picking up on this, France has officially adoptedthe term for government use; its foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, hasexplained that Daish has the added advantage of not granting the group