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.

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.

5. “They told me at the Blood Bank this might happen.”

4. “This is just a 15 minute power nap they raved about in the time management course you sent me to.”

3. “Whew! Guess I left the top off the Whiteout. You probably got here just in time.”

2. “Did you ever notice sound coming out of these keyboards when you put your ear down real close?” And the NUMBER ONE best thing to say if you get caught sleeping at your desk…

1. Raise your head slowly and say, “…in Jesus’ name, Amen.”

I’m feeling lazy, and this blog needs an update. No more bitchiness!! Just good quality plagiarized lists and the like from now on, until I can be arsed to write a proper post. So here it is. Yawn.

1) You don’t need to worry about drinking and driving, although it does pay to check that your chauffeur’s hip flask does only contain water every once in a while.

2) You don’t have to worry each year about filing a tax return. Your accountant makes sure you don’t pay tax.

3) Your parents don’t care if you crash the car.

4) You can use your body clock in the mornings, not the alarm clock.

5) Why rent a porn video when you can rent the porn star?

6) You don’t have to worry about how expensive this petrol station is compared with the rest.

7) You can use a new razor blade every time you shave without feeling wasteful.

The legends preceded it: chocolate so dark it ceased to taste like chocolate. Chocolate so intense it required cautionary statements. Chocolate so fine it cost £75 per kilo.

Such purity is exceptionally rare. A normal Cadbury’s Dairy Milk bar is rumoured to contain about 11% cocoa. The “Dark” chocolate Dairy Milk bar is just 40% cocoa. Connoisseurs must look to a more exotic manufacturer for their intense cocoa hit.

The Lindt Excellence line of fine chocolate bars is widely available in the UK. Dark chocolate versions with 85% cocoa can be found with relative ease at chains as plebeian as ASDA. Such ubiquity is not shared by the 99% bar. For it, one must travel to a Lindt chocolate shop or buy online.

At the shop, I was greeted by two pleasant-enough young women offering free chocolate samples to browsers. My goal clear, I declined their truffles and proceeded straight to the chocolate bar section. There, on the wall, I saw it: a 99%-pure bar of cocoa. One of the saleswomen regarded my choice with concern. She made sure that I knew what I was getting into, that I knew I should enjoy the bar slowly, at home, with proper reverence and plenty of water. Undeterred by the cautionary statements, I asserted my comfort with the chocolate and completed my purchase. On the way home, I picked up a more mundane 85% bar for comparison.

After consuming just three squares of the 99% bar, I felt it was time to bring the experience to an end. The richness of the chocolate was leaving me satiated, and I didn’t want to waste either bar when I was not in the proper mindset for full enjoyment of the act.

If you get the opportunity to try high-quality, high-purity chocolate, I recommend that you indulge. If nothing else, you will gain a new appreciation for the rift between British commodity chocolate and what is possible from the world’s elite chocolatiers such as Lindt.