> I think whenever people say "zeroth" they speak in jest and doubt that there is any disagreement on the fact that the element without predecessor (nowadays in programming most often assigned index 0) is the first element.

"Zeroth" sounds silly because English has generally settled on one-based indexing, and so typically you'd convert to one-based indexing when speaking out loud or writing something other than code (`users[3]` is the "4th user").

Maybe you could argue that the words "first"/"second", as just some letters/sounds, are not inherently one-based? But I feel that gets a bit dubious from "third" onwards where the connection to numbers is obvious, and with the ordinals frequently spelled as 1st/2nd/etc.

But, if you want (and if I'm understanding what you mean), you could replace my statement with: "whether the '1' in that array is the index-1 or index-0 element" - purpose was just to distinguish between ordinals and cardinals, in response to a comment that seemingly implied the cardinality of an empty collection would be 1 with one-based-indexing.