We just followed rails years ago and I still think the names make sense. a 'manyToOne' relationship is not as straight forward to understand as a 'hasMany'... oh wait, I actually confused myself it means 'belongsTo'

I took the liberty to shorten 'hasAndBelongsToMany' because that word is painfully large to write and I've always thought it is equally tough to understand. 'belongsToMany' seems pretty straight forward to me: a student belongs to many courses, an article belongs to many categories, a song belongs to many artists.

Personally I would prefer having human readable names for stuff, instead of the more technical/formal ones