Right. My point (which may not be a particularly great point, but it was what I was trying to convey) is that the lay definition doesn't have any particular tig

Right. My point (which may not be a particularly great point, but it was what I was trying to convey) is that the lay definition doesn't have any particular tight borders; presumably different regex libraries are capable of matching different things, use different syntax, etc. (And this is part of why I find it confusing terminology and would prefer "regular expression" only to mean specifications of regular languages in the original formal sense. But, of course, I'm not the king of language, and it's natural that people would speak the way they speak, given the circumstances.)