construction language

I recently purchased a new dresser at IKEA to replace my previous clothes-storage system, which was an elaborate arrangement of garments in descending order of cleanliness. By which I mean I had two piles on the floor next to my bed: one clean; one dirty. Honestly, this was fine by me.

But my mother is coming into town this weekend, so I felt it was time to give up la vie de bohème and buy a damn dresser - if only to avoid the otherwise inevitable “Oh, sweetie, won’t this wrinkle?” (This is also the reason I have purchased primarily wrinkle-free fabrics for the past ten years.)

Assembling the dresser - named Hemnes, after a Norwegian municipality known, I’m assuming, for its skill with faux antique finishes – is a fairly complicated process. I should point out here that I spent most of my time in college working as a stage carpenter, so my woodworking and construction skills are slightly above average. And certainly above, say, Tim the Tool Man Taylor levels of incompetence. And yet, I've made at least three fatal errors in the course of putting the damn thing together.

Although, to be fair, one of these errors only happened because I was distracted by my idiot cat. She was doing her best to eat a plastic drawer peg.

But most of my problems resulted from a misinterpretation of the directions, which, in typical IKEA fashion, are made entirely out of pictures so that the company doesn’t have to waste time or resources composing and distributing language-specific instructions. (Although: I’ve never been to an IKEA outside of the U.S. I would be incredibly amused if it turned out that every other country got instructions with actual words.)

Anyway, as I flung said instructions across the room for the third time to date, I was struck, suddenly, by a thought: how would you teach someone to write in IKEA? Because you know that there’s totally some corporate retreat where the illustrators and designers get stuck watching PowerPoint presentations about “Affordable solutions for better instruction.”

So I decided to try to decipher IKEA. As far as I can tell, there are eight components to an IKEA instruction booklet. The first is the illustration, the picture that identifies the two pieces you’re working with (and, sometimes, the tool that is needed to work with them). A big black X is applied to certain illustrations to eliminate potential ambiguities, like so:



An arrow identifies the direction of motion, while a line indicates the destination of the action (the insertion point). Speech bubbles are typically used to indicate which piece is being inserted into which. Why speech bubbles, I don’t know. Perhaps to give the illusion of amiability?

Then there are two kinds of numbers: a product number further clarifies the identity of the pieces in question while a multiplier indicates how many particular pieces are needed.

The final key component of IKEA is the facial expression of the little IKEA man.

There’s the happy face:



The sad face:



The confused face:



The I-need-to-go-to-the-gym-because-I-can’t-lift-a-piece-of-fake-wood face:



And the I’m-about-to-die face:



Nowhere, it should be noted, is the why-did-I-buy-this-crap-when-I-could-have-found-real-furniture-on-craigslist face.

Here’s my question: how would each of these parts be identified from a linguistic perspective? Here are some of my suggestions – but I’d love to know in the comments how others might interpret this. After all, I’ve never tried to make sense of a language from scratch (nor am I exactly qualified to do so), and I won’t pretend that this will be rock-solid from a linguistic standpoint. But then again, I’m analyzing an IKEA instruction manual for Pete’s sake, so I think the endeavor is, from an academic standpoint, pretty well fucked from the beginning.

Anyway! The easy stuff first: the illustrations operate as nouns; the multipliers are simple quantifiers.

The arrows and little lines, meanwhile, are the verbs. Under the circumstances, I think we can assume that the only mood in IKEA is imperative. There are, by the way, four main verbs in IKEA (or at least in the Hemnes dialect): put in, screw in, flip over, and lay down. Which leads me to believe that if IKEA were a natural language, it would be the favored language of frat boys everywhere.

The speech bubbles act as case markers: the illustration within the bubble is the object of the verb; the illustration pointed to by the speech bubble is the locative.



All potential instrumentals (i.e., that crappy little Allen wrench) are pre-case-determined on the first page of the book through the use of a similar speech bubble:



The big black X's help clarify the identity of a specific illustration, which could be considered a roundabout demonstrative. This raises the question: do any human languages (as IKEA is clearly, if not inhuman, certainly inhumane) primarily use a “not-those” instead of a “those” construction? I can’t think of one off the top of my head – the closest parallel I can think of are languages like Quechua that have inclusive and exclusive first-person plural pronouns: we-and-you and we-and-not-you.

The product numbers confuse me a bit. Both in real life and in this exercise. Because the pieces aren’t actually marked with their product numbers. The product numbers are only useful in distinguishing between similar pieces – but to do so you have to refer to the chart at the beginning of the book, which shows the product numbers as well as the rough size differences between pieces. Could this be considered a sort of size-related deixis? I’m not sure. I do know, however, that in practice the product numbers are fucking useless, as demonstrated by fatal error #2, which found me lying on my floor under the dresser with my needle-nose pliers in one hand and the biggest mallet I could find in my other. Which is never a good sign.

And then there’s Mr. IKEA Man. What function does he serve? Is he is a disjunctive adverb? An implied apodosis or a conditional mood marker? Or just someone IKEA came up with to taunt me?

Again, these are just thoughts. Because these are the sorts of things I think about. (Well, that and whether or not it is ironic or appropriate that the Indians beat the Yankees on Columbus Day.) But I’m just saying: if anyone out there with a linguistics background were to, oh, make up a mock-formal grammar tree for IKEA, I would provide them with the online equivalent of a nice wet kiss. Like a picture of a really adorable puppy or something.

Meanwhile, I'm going to see if I can't translate something from English to IKEA. Given the relative dearth of verbs, I suspect I'll be limited to translations of pop music. Or porn.

The dresser, by the way, is sitting in my bedroom half-finished, as I’m seriously wondering whether or not the drawers are absolutely necessary. I’m sure if IKEA man were to hear of this, he would look something like this:



Which, come to think of it, rather resembles the expression my mother will probably have come Friday. (More)