Excellent points, all of them @nodolra! You know, I’m sitting here in a room full of modular equipment and stupidly didn’t even consider how much of the room is an output for many of the open jacks, or “female” connections. Man that sounds grimy even to write, though. You’re totally correct about XLR, too! You’re very correct that many of these open jacks are outputs and the 1/4" cable serves merely as a bridge between two sources.
I like the simple reduction to call things i/o for “Input/Output” in this way. But it certainly makes buying cables more confusing. I agree simply calling something “female to male” etc is a good way to know what you’re buying in terms of a cable and it’s connectors. Not sure of a good solution, except to go back to lampooning the original sex-metaphor in the first place. If we need human examples, ‘ball and socket’ with bones works just as comparably.
It’s a shame there’s no clinical term for what a lego brick is for the holes and the bricks. I think the common slang phrase is “studs and tubes” for those separate components, which isn’t exactly an improvement. Still, I’d be fine with us going to the Lego standard! Always have enjoyed the original patent art:
