Arnold Zwicky's Blog

A recent xkcd, 1829: Geochronology:

Not just the names of dog breeds. Dalmatian and Pomeranian are also place-name adjectives, and geological features are very often named after places.

Laika, however, is not a dog breed (or a place-name), but the name of a particular dog. From Wikipedia:

Laika (c. 1954 – November 3, 1957) was a Soviet space dog who became one of the first animals in space, and the first animal to orbit the Earth. Laika, a stray dog from the streets of Moscow, was selected to be the occupant of the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 that was launched into outer space on November 3, 1957.

Maybe the idea is that it sounds like a geographical feature — like taiga, perhaps. From NOAD2:

the sometimes swampy coniferous forest of high northern latitudes, especially that between the tundra and steppes of Siberia and North America.

This entry was posted on April 26, 2017 at 1:53 pm and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Names, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.