You know how you can grow up thinking everyone talks the same way that your parents do? Like my dad will usually substitute the word "pry" for "probably". Don't ask me why, it's just his thing. "I think we'll pry be there in, oh, 17 minutes." I thought that's what everyone said for a while. Maybe too long of a while.
So I just realized that I might be doing the same thing to my kids except instead of shortening a word by a few syllables, I'm replacing the names of different types of furniture with IKEA product names. Here are a few examples.
Daughter: Mom, can I have some tape?
Me: Yes, it's in one of the NORDEN drawers.
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Daughter: Where is your chapstick?
Me: On top of the HEMNES next to the stack of laundry.
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Husband: What do you think about switching the EKTORPs?
Me: Or we could just move the white EKTORP over there instead?
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I guess only time will tell whether our kids will start calling side tables, dressers, and sofas by their nordic names. Our kid could very well be at a friend's house someday and proclaim, "This is the most comfortable EKTORP I've ever sat on!". Of course the difference between this situation and my situation with "pry" is that the couch she'll be sitting on actually has a chance of being just that. Nobody I know besides my dad uses the word "pry".
By the way, I only just found out that there's actually a method to the naming madness over at IKEA. Check this out (compliments of Wikipedia):
IKEA products are identified by single word names. Most of the names are Swedish in origin. Although there are some notable exceptions, most product names are based on a special naming system developed by IKEA.
- Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs: Swedish placenames (for example: Klippan)
- Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian place names
- Dining tables and chairs: Finnish place names
- Bookcase ranges: Occupations
- Bathroom articles: Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays
- Kitchens: grammatical terms, sometimes also other names
- Chairs, desks: men's names
- Fabrics, curtains: women's names
- Garden furniture: Swedish islands
- Carpets: Danish place names
- Lighting: terms from music, chemistry, meteorology, measures, weights, seasons, months, days, boats, nautical terms
- Bedlinen, bed covers, pillows/cushions: flowers, plants, precious stones
- Children's items: mammals, birds, adjectives
- Curtain accessories: mathematical and geometrical terms
- Kitchen utensils: foreign words, spices, herbs, fish, mushrooms, fruits or berries, functional descriptions
- Boxes, wall decoration, pictures and frames, clocks: colloquial expressions, also Swedish place names
Hi! I'm Katie, an occasional ecologist and full-on mother of two, carving out scraps of time to write and reflect on the more bizarre parts of everyday life. Welcome to my dumping ground.
Ha, ha, we have the same chair. Wait, since 90% of our furniture is from IKEA, maybe it's not so strange. Although I can actually make sense of the names, I never saw the pattern so thanks for the education :)
ReplyDeleteYou need to try their dish brushes (yeah, using a sponge for dishes is close to blasphemy and highly unacceptable). I usually get a stash of about five to seven brushes when I go to IKEA. Their brushes totally rule.
Will definitely check out the brush section. By the time I get to the marketplace, I'm usually seeing triple which is probably why I overlooked them before.
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