5 ms·
> Every possible product name is carefully checked to avoid undesirable meanings in other languages, political or religious affiliations and fit into our global
by markvdb 29d ago
> Every possible product name is carefully checked to avoid undesirable meanings in other languages, political or religious affiliations and fit into our global profile.
I present to you "Svalka" wine glasses. Dump", rubbish heap", or easy, promiscuous woman of ill repute in informal Baltic (and Slavic?) slang.
- fangspire 29d agoMy favorite Ikea product name.
- hnarn 28d agoThen maybe you'll enjoy the swedish joke ”It’s not the fart that kills, it’s the smäll” Fart means speed, smäll (smell) means impact or bang.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 28d agoDouble wordplay, not bad. Gives “Descartes before the horse” triple entendre vibes
- deleted 29d ago[deleted]
- tecleandor 29d agoI have a "Särna" chair. "Sarna" in Spanish is "Scabies". Fun fact: Although "Sarna" comes from Latin, seems like it's only used in Romance languages present in the Iberian Peninsula (Galician, Catalan, Portuguese, Spanish...) and not for example in Italian, Romanian or French, as it's an Iberian loan word. Most other languages derive from another different Latin word, "scabiēs".
- memsom 29d agoThe umlaut does mean that to a Swede it is not the same word sound at all. I can only guess that is why it was allowed?
- sureMan6 29d agoThe sound is still very close in this situation (ä before r) my guess is they didn't have the Spanish sarna on their radar
- amarant 29d agoThe source of the word is almost certainly the Swedish town Särna in this case. Note that ä is not an a, in sound it's more similar to e than a, although it is distinct from both.
- cheeseface 29d agoSvalka has been around from at least year 2000. Might even be one of the reasons for the current practice.
- selfmodruntime 29d agoI swear this is untrue. Half the names of ikea products allude to funny words in German.
- froh 29d agofunny indeed! but no trash talk, no swear words, nothing gross or offending.
- pseudohadamard 29d agoDo IKEA have farthinders in their parking lots?
- sebcat 29d agoNo, they are slut
- huhtenberg 29d agoKeanu was excellent in Fart :)
- mszcz 29d agoI mean, if you were to use that name for an IKEA product, you can do worse than wine glasses :P A bed would be a little too on the nose I think.
- hunter2_ 29d agoDoes anyone else get tripped up by the word "avoid" being positioned to apply to each item in the series, but then logically it must only apply to some (the first and second out of 3) items? { avoid meanings, avoid affiliations, avoid fitting } My solution is generally to repeat the word for each item that needs it, but I can see how the repetitiveness isn't great either.
- afiori 28d agoAn Oxford comma before the or would make it clearer maybe
- msabalau 28d agoYou type that as if easy promiscuous woman of ill repute were undesirable...