friendlier names

I'm absolutely certain I'm not the first person to have raised this issue, so feel free to point me at the threads where I can get the rationale... but: to me it looks like git's choice of terminology hurts its adoption and learnability.

For example, why couldn't the "index" be called the "stage" instead? That, along with knowing that "git add" was a synonym for "git stage" would have flattened the learning curve considerably for me.

Thanks,