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Why would anyone call a puzzle Isis.
by vorticalbox 8y ago
Why would anyone call a puzzle Isis.
- cease 8y agoIsis was an Egyptian goddess before her name got coopted by a terrorist group.
- babuskov 8y agoIt's not like the terrorist group choose that name. They choose to call themselves Daesh. ISIS was a term coined by Western miliary and/or media.
- jpatokal 8y agoThe actual name is ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah, "Islamic State". The Arabic acronym Daesh ("D.S.") is considered derogatory by IS itself.
- adrianmonk 8y agoAnyone remember the NFC mobile payments platform from 2011 that was called Isis Wallet? It was a pretty big deal (huge backing by carriers, phone manufacturers, and credit card companies). They changed the name to Softcard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softcard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softcard
- invalidusernam3 8y agoMy brother adopted a dog a few years back named Isis (after the Egyptian god). Even though Isis now had a very different connotation, they felt bad to change the dog's name. They recently adopted another dog which I jokingly recommended they name Al Qaeda.
- seszett 8y agoI didn't know the name "Isis" had actually seen its popularity affected that much in the US? It still feels like a beautiful classical name to me, but then we never used the English name "ISIS" for the organisation, here in France. It's a shame that the multimillenial name of an ancient god could be ruined for some people by an organization that lasted less than a decade, I hope this effect doesn't last.
- code_duck 8y agoMy friend has a 10 year old daughter named Isis.
- cuboidGoat 8y ago"Al Qaeda" can be translated as "The Foundation", and there is apparently some discussion about Bin Laden being an Asimov fan and basing the name of his organisation on the Foundation Series. Also, I am reliably informed that wiping your Al Qaeda has apparently become slang in some places.
- LandR 8y agoWas Isis a well known terrorist organisation in 2009 ?
- 13of40 8y agoI believe it came out when Al Qaeda was the boogey man. ISIS didn't get any press until 2013: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=isis https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=i...
- MithrilTuxedo 8y agoThe Pentagon didn't start calling it the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) until 2017. Prior to then, it was the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Worth noting that the Islamic State has preferred being called ISIS. I think calling them ISIL was being done in part to annoy them.
- jpatokal 8y agoNo, it's more to do with the ambiguity of the Arabic original ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah fī 'l-ʿIrāq wa-sh-Shām. The "Sham" bit here can be refer either to the present day state of Syria, hence ISIS; or the historical greater Syria aka Levant, hence ISIL. However, the group internally dropped the qualified some time ago, now it's just Islamic State, with the obvious implication that it's the global state for true believers. Wikipedia goes into all this in detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_Islamic_State_of_...
- probably_wrong 8y agoThere was a tweet about the poor NSA intern who would be tasked with the code to identify whether "is" referred to the organization or the verb. The paranoid side of me always assumed that the rebranding to Isis could have been suggested by the Pentagon to news organizations for that reason.
- jasonlotito 8y agoIsis and ISIS are two completely different and unrelated things.
- gweinberg 8y agoYes, there are a lot of people named Isis. It used to be possible to get a Coke that said 'Share a Coke with Isis' on it, but i think they stopped making them.
- psergeant 8y agoParts of the Thames that flow through Oxford are called “The Isis” (presumably after the Goddess), and there are (or at least were) a good number of Oxford things called that