@Isaac not saying you are wrong, and I may be an anomaly, but in my personal experience everything below is about 180 out.
At first I assumed this was some difference in British vs American English. As we know these Brits here do not always speak properly and have some very silly language differences (lifts, and the Tube, and Chips for French Fries). So I checked your profile, and clearly you are not British.
In my experience only time it is referred to as a column is in display but in database design its a field. And it is the non db people, who work in Excel that are the ones calling everything a column.
I personally would never say I join two columns together, or call it a Primary and Foreign column, or it is a required column, etc.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I'm comfortable just chalking some of these diverging viewpoints up to personal experiences and moving on.
I do see your point, it's just definitely different in my experience. I've worked on a variety of SQL Server teams (talking about US companies, as you mention), ranging from major banks (Wells), insurance companies, healthcare companies, etc., and a few SQL dev groups that were combined with the Oracle guys, and for some odd reason, my experience is the opposite of yours (I assume that's what 180 out means??).
I would never
not say joining two tables "on [a certain] column". I won't say I've NEVER heard "on __ field", it's happened at least a few times, it's just not how most of them talk that I have been around.
Almost everyone I have heard at the professional level in RDBMS teams (sql server and oracle), talks about columns as columns, including joining on columns. A few well-known people on places like sql server central even put it in their signatures (!) to encourage newcomers to begin learning how to think in terms of acting on Columns. Some of them even make kind of a big deal out of it.
For example. I google "sql server join tables". From the Results page, you see 99.9% reference to "Columns". I do a Ctrl+F in Chrome for "Field", and I only see TWO references on the whole results page. Those two results are from "webpagesolutions.com" and "tutorialssolution.com".....
However, I can respect your approach as it's based on your experiences, we probably each subconsciously have steered our career experiences in 100 different tiny ways where for whatever reason, I ended up being exposed to it as mostly one thing, you as another.
But remember, I have already--in a different thread I think? losing track now--acknowledged that I was
wrong about the Access term. It is true that Microsoft insists on calling them Fields in Access and that is what it is, to the extent that I failed to give credit to that in my earliest posts, I was wrong. And to be clear, in this post, I am only talking about the "bigger picture" RDBMS terminology. So if you, in your post, were only referring to Access, then yes, I was wrong because in Access they're called fields, no matter what I think of it.