No logo

I had another Ikea-related epiphany the other day. This one had nothing to do with yogurt, or sofas, or even utensil holders: it was more of an editorial epiphany, really. As I typed "IKEA" in an e-mail, it suddenly occurred to me to wonder why I wasn't saying "Ikea" instead.

Thinking that a company name should be capitalized (or otherwise accessorized) a certain way just because that's how the company's graphic designers decided its logo should look is a particular bugbear of mine, and yet here I have been doing exactly that for as long as I've been writing the name of a particular Swedish furniture superstore and all-round place of wonder. I don't write Macy*s or GAP when I refer to those fine establishments, so why on earth have I been writing IKEA in all caps?

If you want a better say-so than mine to reference for how to treat logos like real words, look here. This man knows what he's talking about. (And yes, I stole my Macy's example from his piece.) 

In my defence, if there is such a thing, perhaps its foreign provenance lulled my subconscious into thinking that it was an abbreviation: Ideal Kitchens Ever After, or maybe something more Scandinavian, like Inbyn Knappa Ekarp Aspelund*, perhaps. Maybe it thought it was the initials of the nice man who started the shop: Ingmar Knut Edgar Allenpoe**. Or maybe it's just that after looking at the damn website and everything in the place and driving by the enormous sign so often that my two-year-old thinks anything written in yellow on blue says "Ikea," the logo had worked its insidious magic and subjugated my sensible inner editor. For shame!

******

So then, in the interests of completeness, I went to Wikipedia and looked up Ikea. And lo! and behold! It feckin' well is an abbreviation*** after all: the I and K are for the bloke who started it, and the E and A are for his farm and its parish. Thus meaning
(a) I was right all along
(b) I can go back to writing IKEA now
(c) I don't have to worry about whether I should go back and correct all the instances of IKEA heretofore appearing in the blog
(d) but this entire post is somewhat pointless

Ah well. You live, you learn, you buy some nice reconditioned Danish teak mid-century modern instead.


*Yes, those are actual Ikea product names.
**No, that is not the actual name of the Ikea founder.
***There is a completely different editorial issue at stake here which I really don't wish to get into, about whether it's an abbreviation or an acronym. And if it is an acronym, as I think it should be since it's pronounced as a word rather than individual letters, then I might have to return to my original stance, blame the graphic designers who are taking over the world, and start a single-handed campaign to have it spelled Ikea.

I knew I didn't want to get into that. You wouldn't believe how many times I changed my mind in that last paragraph.