So I was out travelling the other week and went to an acupuncture place I found on a local directory website called Local Worm. Here’s the link I found whilst on Google: Acupuncture in Yuma.

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It’s been 420 all night.

Sorry.

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It’s true: I’m back with another update after months of neglect. And I have a treasure trove of goodies to bring you over the coming days, my children. To kick this off, I’m doing a special feature on…REFLECTOPORN.

No explanation is needed as we delve into this bizarre world.

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At first, I thought that there wasn’t much to say about Vikings. I’ve been watching TechnoViking on YouTube quite a lot, but everyone knows he isn’t a genuine Viking anyway. I considered giving them the benefit of the doubt and broadening the General Banter category to include virtually all barbarian hordes of all stripes.

Then I realized that there’s a reason that people still talk about Vikings - they were the dog’s bollocks. First of all, as far as true Vikings are concerned, there is Beowulf. Yes, he was a Geat - but that’s a lot closer than a lot of other Viking heroes get to the frozen tundra of the Northlands. Vikings terrorised Europe, their descendants conquered this country, and they pioneered trans-Atlantic exploration and colonization, established colonies in Greenland and Canada.

Viking mythology is fucking brilliant. The eddas and sagas outline a divine opera with contains the underpinnings of some Christian lore and rivals Greco-Roman mythology as far as internecine bitchiness is concerned. Not only that, but while Zeus was just another sky-god, Odin had a pair of ravens and only one eye. Not to mention the eight-legged horse. And let’s not forget one of the great tricksters of all time, Loki, and Ragnarok, the end of the reign of the gods, in a giant cosmic battle that pits god against titan.

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Why does everything have weird names? Every container, shelf, cabinet or appliance had some odd name, as if people from Planet Sweden anthropomorphized these objects, naming each one they encountered as best they could:

BESTA
HEDDA
BJARNUM
LERBERG
INREDA
EKTORP
GRUNDTON
BERTA
KARNA

It turns out, Bryne writes, that the Wikipedians had already cracked the code:

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

Materials, 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; words related to sleep, comfort, and cuddling [cuddling?]

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 placenames

I love discovering a nomenclature’s inner structure; it’s so satisfying to know that someone has taken the time and care to think creatively about the work that names do.

Still, the IKEA taxonomy is no less enigmatic for having been described. I’m sure there are several PhD theses waiting to be written about it. Music, chemistry, and nautical terms for lighting? Feminine names for curtains, masculine names for chairs and desks? And what subtle intra-Scandinavian tensions or harmonies are revealed by the assignment of Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish words to certain categories but not others? Is there some national stereotype about the Finns (for example) setting an especially attractive table? Or, more perversely, not?

The Wikipedia article continues:

Because IKEA is a world-wide company working in several countries with several different languages, sometimes the Nordic naming leads to problems where the word means something completely different to the product. A well known example was the bed frame GUTVIK. As the word can be pronounced Gootfick it invites German-speaking people to understand it like gut fick which is somewhat close to “good fuck” in German.

Then there’s this tidbit:

Company founder Ingvar Kamprad, who is dyslexic, found that naming the furniture with proper names and words, rather than a product code, made the names easier to remember.

Take heed, O ye makers of automobiles and techno gizmos.

The name IKEA, by the way, is an acronym. IK stands for Ingvar Kamprad; the E stands for Elmtaryd, the farm where Kamprad grew up, and the A is for Agunnaryd, Kamprad’s home village.

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