It’s easy to get caught up in semantics. Figuring out the best names for variables, tables, columns, classes, etc is something that can eat up hours or even days of a development schedule. The idea is that the more precise the name, the better it is. The arguments for precision naming are many :
Keep in mind, I’m not talking about naming conventions. Naming conventions are simply rules for choosing the character sequences. They don’t dictate what words you should assign to things in your code.
Whatever names developers choose, they will get strewn throughout the layers of the application. Database, table and column names will be impacted. Variables in server-side scripts. Organization of classes into folders. Javascript file names. Memcache keys. URLs. Just like sand at the beach, the labels the dev team decided on goes everywhere you can think of. Invariably, the marketing team will bound down the hall, and announce the product is being rebranded. Jobs will become Gigs. Friends will become Followers. Application code will become confusing.
New devs won’t get it anyway.
The fact of the matter is overthinking naming is a good way to get nowhere fast. Keeping it simple and just take enough time to make sure that things make sense will give devs more time to focus on important stuff. Like being able to articulate the thought process behind code.