"These people aren't trying to promote something other than disorder, and to take over that country and turn it into a caliphate and then spread it around the world. This is a group of people who don't merit the word 'insurgency,' I think," he told a bemused Pentagon briefing. When the general sitting next to him kept using the word, Rumsfeld suggested he switch to "enemies of the legitimate Iraqi government".

If arguments over its name are the measure of a movement's power, then the insurgents who currently hold the city of Mosul and large parts of northern and western Iraq have already achieved a worrying pre-eminence.

Some people call them ISIS - which is either inaccurate or inconsistent; others call them ISIL; and they have stated that they prefer to be called Islamic State, which media have shortened to IS. When our chief correspondent Paul McGeough started adding "so-called" to this name, it seemed fair enough, as the claim which this movement makes for itself - that it represents authentic Islam and so all true Muslims - is widely disputed. Indeed, Muslim leaders in Egypt have suggested the acronym QSIS, which reminds us that IS is a breakaway from al-Qaeda and removes Islam from its description altogether.

The decision by Tony Abbott and Julie Bishop to start using the term Daesh, however, opens up several cans of worms. At one level, it changes nothing: Daesh is itself an acronym, the Arabic equivalent of ISIL - the D stands for state, the A for Islamic, the E for Iraq and the SH for Levant. So why bother?

"Daesh hates being referred to by this term, and what they don't like has an instinctive ­appeal to me," Abbott has said. This is the logic not of the battleground but of the playground.

Elsewhere the argument has been made that Daesh is what Arabs call the movement. The issue I have with this is that Arabs speak Arabic, and the vast majority of Western politicians - including Abbott and Bishop - don't.

Unlike most Arabic acronyms, Daesh lacks a meaning, so why it should annoy those to whom it is applied is something of a mystery. I have heard people say that it is because it resembles the word daasa, to trample underfoot, but I'm not convinced. My own feeling is that in Arabic words that end with the letter shin tend to be colloquial and negative - mafish (there aren't any), maalaysh (it doesn't matter) and baarufsh (I don't know), while IS is trying to stamp itself as both dignified and eternal.

I have two concerns about where the word Daesh leaves us. The first is that children tend to resort to name-calling when other forms of leverage are out of reach. Is this the point we have reached with IS? They have changed the facts on the ground in Iraq and Syria, in appalling and perhaps irrevocable ways. The question remains - as the United States veers between building up and playing down talk of an imminent march on Mosul - whether Washington and its Western and Arab allies have an effective answer beyond tinkering with terminology.

The second, deeper concern is that no Western politician ever felt the need to change the names of militant organisations that made similarly grandiose and similarly disputed claims, such as Islamic Jihad ("just war"), Jemaah Islamiyah (which means "Islamic Society") or Hezbollah ("party of God"), even when they did commit terrorist atrocities. I can't help thinking that this is because those names are already in Arabic, a language we consider appropriate for containing things we don't like. If the Islamists of Hizb al-Tahrir translated their name into English and called themselves "the Liberation Party", I bet we'd be having the same argument.

But as long as these groups we object to are defined in "Terrorbic" -  the language of hoodoos, a language that politicians like Abbott and Bishop know resonates negatively with the vast majority of Australians (just think of the reaction to words like "halal", "sharia" and "fatwa"), then we're good.

The Prime Minister's national security address on Monday proved conclusively that he doesn't know how he sounds to Muslims. But he certainly knows how everything Muslim sounds to the rest of his audience.

Maher Mughrabi is Foreign Editor of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.