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Comment by markvdb | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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Svalka has been around from at least year 2000. Might even be one of the reasons for the current practice.

I swear this is untrue. Half the names of ikea products allude to funny words in German.

funny indeed!

but no trash talk, no swear words, nothing gross or offending.

I 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".

The 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?

The sound is still very close in this situation (ä before r) my guess is they didn't have the Spanish sarna on their radar

To me, a dane, that would be like saying "sarna" and "særna" is the same. They're not.

> The sound is still very close

What do you base this on? Do you speak Swedish? Did you look up the phonetics?

They are no more similar than A and E in English.

The 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.

You type that as if easy promiscuous woman of ill repute were undesirable...

Does 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.

An Oxford comma before the or would make it clearer maybe

Do IKEA have farthinders in their parking lots?

No, they are slut

Keanu was excellent in Fart :)

My favorite Ikea product name.

Then 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.

Double wordplay, not bad. Gives “Descartes before the horse” triple entendre vibes

I 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.

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