I really had no idea that my (somewhat unintended) misnomer would have caused such a stir. Indeed, I appreciate that some commenters have replied that this is basic relational design.

I wrote this article from a programmer's point of view, in that classes that one builds in an object oriented paradigm should ideally be loosely coupled.

If I were building an application to represent the data that was stored in the User, Group, and User_Group tables, I would build the classes such that the User and Group classes could be loosely coupled and exist independently of one another...that is my justification of using "decoupled".

Like I said, I do agree that this article represents the basics of relational design, it becomes a more robust situation when "coupled" with the programming side of it.