I am a software developer with a bit of a linguistic slant. We were recently given some training on how to name database fields and were told to avoid adjectives in names.
Then we were given an example: “employee_id” is considered a bad name because of the adjective. I just about exploded. “Employee” is a noun, not an adjective. Which makes “employee” a determiner!
And then I thought about it some more and wanted to make sure I had the right definition of “determiner”, which is admittedly a fuzzy definition. “Employee” is essential to the meaning of “employee ID”. Then again, is this really “short” for “employee’s ID” (in which case the genitive noun is definitely a determiner)?
Is there a good definition of “determiner” out there? Is “employee” in this case a determiner? And why?