You're the one arguing from the extremely strained logic that because ordering rules exist for strings, this somehow means that C++ vectors have anything to do

You're the one arguing from the extremely strained logic that because ordering rules exist for strings, this somehow means that C++ vectors have anything to do with mathematical vectors in the mind of the average programmer. The practical problem is, when you do a lot of work with linear algebra, you would really like to have the term vector to use for its canonical mathematical meaning rather than having it reserved for a data structure which is not suitable for that purpose.