I agree it is odd to say that something is running concurrently but with out concurrency. The problem is threads and locks and what not are well known as concurrency primitives, programming with them known as concurrent programming, etc. So what do we call concurrent programming that doesn't make use of any of the concurrency primitives, concurrent programming techniques? We want to call it something but we don't want to co-opt current nomenclature. Parallel isn't "taken" and does an OK job of expressing what they are doing.