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Comment by phinnaeus | Hacker News Reader

FYI the caption of the "spirit animals" image says "canadian goose" instead of "Canada Goose".

Likely a regional thing; they are consistently called Canadian Geese where I grew up and where I currently live.

I've only heard people in my entire lifetime call them Canadian Geese.

The only time I've ever even seen or heard of Canada Goose/Geese are people on the internet telling others they are wrong.

I think it's time to just accept it as correct.

Absolutely, it's like living in London and eventually having to accept that tourists will always say "Big Ben" when they mean the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster, which encloses the bell whose actual name is Big Ben. The name of the tower is, de facto, Big Ben, and life gets so much easier when you drop the urge to tell people they are wrong all the time...

Edit: TIL the tower was properly renamed "Elizabeth Tower" in 2012 [0] but I seriously doubt a single person in the last 12 years has ever used that name...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Ben

I wouldn't put that in the same category. If you say Canada Goose everyone still knows what you mean. If you say Elizabeth Tower, they probably don't.

In real life, I have only ever heard Canada Goose.

I am missing the reference to the canadian goose and the retriever puppy as spirit animals. Is that to say the H100 is an ornery thing, but the RTX4090 is friendly?

I’d assumed (like you) it meant that the H100 is ornery AND pickier about what it consumes, while the RTX4090 is playful and will eat damn near anything within reach of its mouth (with its sharp, velociraptor-like puppy teeth), whether you want it to or not.

But that may be straining the meme somewhat. :)

Don't worry, the Geese are en route to location, resolution incoming. Stand by.

In my experience, Canadian geese are never en route to anywhere. They stay next to the pond year round and crap everywhere you might want to step. EG: https://sanjosespotlight.com/going-to-santa-clara-central-pa...

It’s a Canada Goose from Canada. A Canadian Canada Goose, or Canadian Goose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...

An error too often made.

Who cares

Canadian goose seems better in [current year], to avoid confusion with the clothing brand.

I consider bad the habit of English to use nouns also as adjectives, because it causes many ambiguities, some of which can be very annoying, even if they are a rich source of jokes and word plays.

In most languages the use of a noun as an adjective is marked, by a particle or by an affix or at least by a different stress pattern (like moving the stress to the last syllable), which removes the ambiguities.

So for most non-native speakers "Canadian goose" makes much more sense than "Canada goose" (which may feel like "Canada and a goose" or "a goose that is also Canada" and not like "a goose from Canada").

Now you made me think of ways to English Adjective my text for word play... make it stop.

"Canada" isn't being used as an adjective though. The name of the species is "Canada Goose", like "Long Island Shellfish" or "Dublin Bay Prawns".

You have just proven my point.

In the names "Canada Goose", "Long Island Shellfish" and "Dublin Bay Prawns", "Canada", "Long Island" and "Dublin Bay" are adjectives, because geese are not also "Canada", shellfish are not also "Long Island" and prawns are not also "Dublin Bay".

This kind of names is typical for English, but not for most other languages.

For instance, the scientific name of the Canada goose is "canadensis", which means "Canadian", not "Canada".

An adjective (in the broad sense) is a word that describes a subset of the set named by the noun to which it is attached.

While most languages also include distinct words that are adjectives in the narrow sense, i.e. which have degrees of comparison, adjectives in the broad sense (sometimes called relational adjectives) can be derived from any noun by various means, e.g. genitive case markers, prepositions, postpositions, suffixes, prefixes or accentual patterns, except for ambiguous languages like English, where any noun can also be used as an adjective, and sometimes also as a verb.

always the former noun is describing the latter. Butter fly is not a flying butter (as my children's teacher told them to make a joke about butterfly) but a fly made of butter instead.

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