And how many angels can dance around the head of a pin? 

The person who corrected you could themselves be corrected.

 - Table = Relation

 - Row = Tuple

 - Column = Attribute

 - Domain = Data Type

See the Wikipedia entry on relational databases [here][1].

I worked for an airline and the word "flight" could be used in three different ways depending on whether you were talking to pilots/flight-attendants, engineers or marketing. 

- pilots/attendants: a "flight" was out and back from base (i.e. two take-offs and two landings),
-  engineers: one take-off and one landing, could be test, repair, training (i.e. one airport back to the same airport) or a "leg", i.e. one airport to another - what "civilians" would normally call a flight, as in "I'm catching my flight home tomorrow"),

- marketing: a six month (typically on-season or off-season) series of "flights" from/to a given airport in the context of a contract.



The spreadsheet analogy is more than good enough for 99.99% of cases, even in reasonably technical speech (unless one is a professor of relational algebra). Does the person who corrected you use the word "whom" correctly? 99.99% of people don't and it really doesn't matter.


  [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_database