The part that non-Debianistas find hard is knowing how the various codenames are sequenced - is Etch before or after Lenny, for example? This is important if you stumble on a forum posting for Debian when trying to configure another distro, and would like to know if the information within is of a similar vintage to your version.
Ubuntu uses codenames that are alphabetically sequenced, so as long as you know the latest release it's easy to tell the Breezy is a very old version. (I know Warty Warthog was older but that's before they got onto the alphabetical sequence I think).