yeah it's definitely not one for the rooftops with a megaphone anyway.

This is also a good time for many of us to work on social skills: most people like getting help with a second language as long as it's not putting them on the spot & if you have a good relationship with someone you can bring it up at the right time more along the lines of “Isn't English so absurdly arbitrary?” than something to be defensive about.

I think this is being unnecessarily non-confrontational. As long as you explain why the term is wrong or sub-optimal and what it should be called instead, I can't see how any serious programmers should take offence.

Consider it this way: natively speaking English means you have domain knowledge, sharing that domain knowledge should feel no different from pointing out mistakes in other domains. If someone gets English wrong, that's no different from getting, say, VAT calculation wrong.

Maybe I'm just assuming everyone already handles mistakes in other domains with tact and respect.

Also, it's a matter of proportion. If a function name is extremely misleading that's different from a function name just using an awkward synonym, just as a broken piece of code is different from dodgy indentation. You'll want to fix either problem eventually, but the immediate repercussions are quite different (serious bug vs minor annoyance, basically).

> As long as you explain why the term is wrong or sub-optimal and what it should be called instead

I think we're generally in agreement – I was trying to keep the focus on things which can be reasonably be considered objectively wrong and keeping the degree of wrongness in mind when deciding how to handle it. If you're on the low end of that scale, it's probably not a good use for everyone's time in a code-review session unless it happens a lot.