The problem is that we, both people using git and teaching git, constantly say thing like “a commit is on this branch” or “we need to merge these branches” or e

The problem is that we, both people using git and teaching git, constantly say thing like “a commit is on this branch” or “we need to merge these branches” or even in the OP zine “you can remove commits from a branch.” All of these phrases reinforce the common misconception that branches are “containers” for commits. It would seem that you could query, “oh, what branch is this commit on?” But that’s not how git works. A commit has no idea what branch it is on, and that’s unintuitive. The only definition of being “on a branch” is, starting at the commit that the branch is currently pointing to, all ancestors of that commit are on the branch.