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IKEA: linguistics, esthetics, engineering

Language Log 2025-03-08

First, how to say the name. 

I think that the "correct" pronunciation of IKEA is "ee-kay-uh", with emphasis on the "ee" sound, similar to the way a native Swedish speaker would say it, not "eye-kee-ah" or "ai-kee-uh" with stress on the second syllable, the way most Americans say it (all the Americans I know).

What does it mean?

IKEA is an acronym for Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd, the names of the founder and the places where he grew up.

In my lifetime, I've probably put together ten items of IKEA furniture, the most recent being their simplest, cheapest bed frame called Neiden.  It was a tremendous challenge, taking me a total of two whole, taxing, exhausting days.

I didn't follow their advice that it requires two people to put Neiden together.  That was a mistake.

Their drawings are in two dimensions, but require you to think and act in three dimensions.

In the entire booklet of instructions (about ten pages), I did not see a single word (all drawings), but I did twice see this symbol:  ⓘ ("i" inside of a circle).  I think it means "this drawing provides 'information' about what you're supposed to do with these parts".  One of these ⓘs occurred in an expanded drawing that explained how to assemble the two parts of a wrench — the hard plastic handle and the metal Allen hex wrench (the one with only a single bend).  Sounds simple, right?  Wrong.

Assembling this wrench was one of the trickiest maneuvers (there were many tricky maneuvers) that had to be applied in putting the bed frame together.  The relevant drawing showed where to insert the wrench into the handle, and it even had an arrow indicating which direction to push the wrench.  But then I started to tremble, because embossed on the top surface of the black handle at one end was the numeral "4" and at the other end was the numeral "5".  There was no explanation for what "4" and "5" meant.  As I pushed this way and that, the wrench would not engage solidly with the handle.  I began to swear (aver — not yet curse) that the numerals were printed backwards and at the wrong ends of the handle.

I was just beginning, yet already I was getting very, very frustrated by this three inch two-part device.  As I twisted and turned those two small components, flipping them in different directions, suddenly the wrench clicked / locked in as solidly as if they were one piece made of two different materials. 

How did I do it???  During all of my flipping and flopping, twisting and turning, it transpired that I twisted and turned, flipped and flopped the two parts at the same time.

Triumph!!  Victory!!

Now I had a wrench firmly affixed to a handle.

And so it went for two days.

The above account of the trial of making the Allen hex wrench with handle serves as a prelude to this fugue about the making of a piece of furniture.

The Neiden bed frame came in a flat box that was about 6.5 ft. long, a foot or so wide, and four inches thick (those dimensions are all retrospective guesstimates).  The box was heavy and tightly packed, so that it must have taken quite a bit of ingenuity to determine the order in which the pieces were placed.  It was even somewhat difficult to extricate the individual pieces from their interlocking jigsaw-like assembly inside of the cardboard box.

As I pulled out the wooden parts of the bed frame, the aroma of perfectly, freshly sawn lumber from a Swedish forest filled my room.  Ahh!  Refreshing!  Invigorating!

I laid out all of the parts on the floor in neat piles, familiarizing myself with which parts were supposed to go where.

The directions are mostly accurate, but occasionally they are impenetrable and rarely they are inaccurate.  I'm told that there's a skit somewhere on the internet (maybe from SNL) that joshes people struggling to make sense of IKEA direction manuals.

All together, there were about ninety pieces big and small, mostly microscopically numbered to identify what goes where.  There were four tiny screws — the smallest items in the box — that were neither numbered nor even pictured in the manual.  That really worried me.  What was I going to do with those four tiny numberless, pictureless screws?

I set the little screws aside, fearful that they might get lost as I shuffled all the other parts around, but in the end decided there was nothing I could do beside wait and see when I finished putting all the other parts together if there were four wee holes that remained unfilled.

Like their design, IKEA instructions are minimalist.  Let us just say that you have to be good at intuiting and extrapolating to successfully put together a piece of IKEA furniture, plus you have to possess stamina and be good at filling in the gaps, and don't expect to complete the task "full fart".

Previous Language Log posts (see "Selected readings" below) have described and analyzed IKEA nomenclatural practice.  Quaint, to say the least.

No matter what the ultimate shape of your new IKEA furniture, it's almost certain to come in a flat package, in accordance with a vow of Ingvar Kamprad to make it easy for you to transport home in your car.  I live less than twenty miles from Plymouth Meeting, where the first IKEA store in America was established in 1985.  (Eight years later, they moved a few miles down the road to a town with a name I love, Conshohocken (Unami for "pleasant valley"), where they constructed a gigantic store which also houses the US corporate headquarters of IKEA.  Oft were the times when the IDEA brain taxing began with wrestling their flat (and sometimes long) package into or on your car and tying it down with twine.

People came to the IKEA store in Plymouth Meeting from as far away as New England, the Carolinas and Florida, and the Midwest.

When I lived in Sweden for a year, I quickly became familiar with the adage of their Scandinavian neighbors that the Swedes were "a nation of engineers".  They bear that reputation out from the construction and quality of their thousands of cleanly crafted and elegantly designed household furnishings.

In Sweden, at least when I lived there, everything fit together neatly and clicked tightly in place.  They were / are engineers par excellence.

Oh, but what about those four tiny screws left lingering on my rug?  I searched high and low, backwards and forward all over my snugly joined Neiden.  Finally I spied four teeny holes that had been drilled on the inside face of four rectangular wooden blocks that served as extra supports for the legs of the bed.  As instructed by the enigmatic drawings in the inscrutable manual, I had attached the blocks to the legs with two each of the stubby, grooved dowels that came in a plastic bag.  There they were, hanging from the legs of the bed, but they didn't seem very secure.  In fact, they were kind of dangling from the legs, and I was afraid they would fall off when I moved the bed around in the slightest.

Trepidatiously, I screwed the itsy-bitsy screws into the teeny-weeny holes on the inside face of the legs hidden underneath the hard wooden slats that served as the "springs" beneath the mattress.  Miraculously, the blocks no longer wobbled!  I can sleep in peace on my new Neiden.

 

Selected readings