I don't disagree with any of your points. Personally, I even take it a step further by pluralizing both nouns in a "join table" name. For example, a model which

I don't disagree with any of your points. Personally, I even take it a step further by pluralizing both nouns in a "join table" name. For example, a model which joins a Group and a User will be named "GroupUser" and the table will be named "groups_users". In my mind, the ORM object is a representation of a single group and a single user, so GroupUser. The table is a representation of all member users for all groups: groups_users. That goes against Rails conventions so I have to manually define the table name on such models but I also understand it's not exactly easy to detect these irregular inflections. I'll take the trade-off.