I agree with your pet peeve. ActiveRecord (Rails ORM) encourages by convention that your tables are named in the plural, and it sometimes drives me crazy. When writing queries outside the ORM, I end up aliasing tables/relations to the singular so the query is more sane to reason about, e.g.:
> SELECT person.id, person.name, person.age ... FROM people person JOIN ...
Which reads so much nicer to me than:
> SELECT people.id, people.name, people.age ... FROM people JOIN ...
(obviously a somewhat contrived example because of the people/person inflection that makes it awkward already)
> SELECT person.id, person.name, person.age ... FROM people person JOIN ...
Which reads so much nicer to me than:
> SELECT people.id, people.name, people.age ... FROM people JOIN ...
(obviously a somewhat contrived example because of the people/person inflection that makes it awkward already)