[condwanaland]

Say I have a dataframe called 'penguins'

I can write code like: penguin_sizes <- select(penguins, weight, height)

Here, weight and height are columns inside the dataframe. But I can refer to them as if they were objects in the environment (I., e without quotes) because the select function looks for them inside the penguins dataframe (it's first argument)

This is a very simple example but it's used extensively in some R paradigms

[data-ottawa]

Yes, this exactly.

And its why you can do plot(x, sin) and get properly labelled graphs. It also powers the formula API that made caret and glm modules so easy to use.