Last week, in a talk at the Human Rights Foundation’s Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway, the Nigerian playwright and poet Wole Soyinka condemned this logic. And his reasoning is worth considering: After all, the 81-year-old Nobel laureate intimately understands the potency of language. He has spent his career deploying words against kleptocrats and dictators, a practice that earned him 22 months in solitary confinement in Nigeria and later a death sentence in absentia. “Art should expose, reflect, indeed magnify the decadent, rotten underbelly of a society that has lost its direction,” he wrote in 1977. In 2016, he sees that rotten underbelly stretching roughly from Raqqa in Syria, which ISIS claims as its capital, to the Sambisa Forest in Nigeria, where the group’s affiliate Boko Haram is active.

In Oslo, Soyinka’s message was to not underestimate the force of semantics. “Language is part of the armory of human resistance,” he said. “Rejection of the self-ascribed goals of an enemy is a critical part of the defense mechanism of the assaulted. Whenever an unconscionable claim is denied, rejected, openly derided, it erodes the very base of the aggressor’s self-esteem.”

Today’s preeminent aggressor is not “Islamic.” It’s more like an “Anti-Islamic Murder Incorporated” whose existence and activities have not been endorsed by a single internationally recognized Islamic nation, argued Soyinka, who grew up in a Christian household but later embraced elements of traditional Yoruba spirituality.

Nor is the enemy a state. It’s more like “a sadistic, morbidity-obsessed, irredentist group [that] indulges itself in destabilizing states—genuine states, that is—and extinguishing peoples, the Yazidis [in Iraq] most notoriously.” And yet, he continued, “we insist on respectfully referring to them as a state. Such proponents of spurious egalitarianism fail a crucial test of responsibility to truth and language. Yes, there’s freedom of expression, but there’s also freedom of choice of expression. And that does not cost much.”

Soyinka criticized publications for their promiscuous use of the name Islamic State. “Those who live directly under the sword [of the group in Syria and Iraq] have no choice: They must call them by the name they choose for themselves. But what of the rest of us?” he asked. The media’s normalization of the term, he charged, is “an act of insidious cooperation with the agenda of unlimited violence.”

Journalists are deluding themselves if they think they’re being impartial in calling the organization by its self-proclaimed name, Soyinka told me after his speech. “Language is hardly ever neutral. … [Journalists] have no choice but to make a choice.”

And they’re deluding themselves if they believe they’re merely documenting the conflict between the organization and its opponents, rather than being engaged in it. Their stake in that conflict goes beyond the beheadings of journalists like James Foley and Steven Sotloff. “Far and above any other enemy I have ever recognized, [groups like ISIS and Boko Haram represent] something totally deleterious to humanity,” said Soyinka. “How do you fight such enemies except with everything you have, including language?”