You can't hold -5 apples any more than you can hold 5i apples, and yet we don't call numbers below zero "pretend numbers". I'm not arguing that imaginary numbers aren't imaginary, I'm arguing that calling them "imaginary" was dumb and creates a psychological barrier for students.

Most kinds of number are imaginary. That's not how you name things.

And "real" numbers introduce tons of wackiness, much more than gets introduced when you expand "real" numbers to "complex" numbers.