I'm not a C++ programmer; I don't know what half the names are from the GoF book. Does that make them bad names? No! Since when should a word have to carry around its own definition so that people who've never seen it before automatically know what it means?

I mean, some concepts are clearly not able to be explained to the layman; you need some background. But do people really need to learn abstract algebra to be able to get their heads around this stuff? Are there no better terms that communicate to more people?

Concepts like Functor and Monoid and Monad are extremely simple. You don't need to go back to school to learn them. You only run into trouble if you expect them to be explainable by analogy to a more concrete notion.

And, given that that's the problem, clearly dog breeds are not the answer either.

It was a sarcastic remark but it highlights an important point I want to make. Assuming you knew nothing at all about dogs; if you were given a list of dog breeds and a stack of photos of dogs, would you be able to match the breed names to the photos? No, probably not. That doesn't mean their names are bad; you simply lack the experience to figure it out.