Iirc Gauss suggested "lateral numbers". Not the worst idea, but it's too late now.

We could've called the imaginaries "orthogonals", "perpendiculars", "complications", "atypicals", there's a million other options. I like the idea that a number is complex because it has a "complicated component".

Twisted ? Rotated ?

I mean that they're not really numbers.

Usually they explain it something like: oh, at first people didn't know what 2-5 added up to, but then we invented negative numbers. Well, complex numbers are that but for square roots of negative numbers.

But that's a completely misleading way to explain these things. Complex numbers aren't numbers aren't numbers really.