@Gallifreyan Well, as long as you also never refer to Coriolis force or to the force that presses you back when you accelerate, I suppose it's consistent. But words are there to get people to understand you. A minor technical detail like "a tomato is not a vegetable" or "centrifugal force doesn't exist" just hinders conversation in many cases. Why would you not take the reference frame of the spaceship, anyway? It's the only interesting thing in that region of space.

You said yourself that "centripetal" means "towards the centre". If the dominant force acted towards the centre, they'd… move towards the centre. You do mean "centrifugal", which means "fleeing the centre". In any normal conversation, the terms mean exactly what they say. Gravity is similarly a fictional force, but no-one says it doesn't exist.