I advised putting a blankline between the first line of a docstring and the rest of it, not between the docstring and the body of the function.
Re. prefix, Wordnet is more precise than Collins here: “an affix that is added in front of the word”. A prefix is not just a sequence of characters, it’s a morpheme (building block for word, if you want). So prefix is a wrong name in the docstring of str.startswith, since e.g. “pyt” is not a prefix, whereas “out” is, but str.startswith works with any sequence, not only something that is a prefix.
> Other reviewers didn't pose the current name as inapt
They’re not linguists. Not saying this is a good or bad thing. :)
Using linguistics terms to speak of computer languages is often a bad thing, but in this case I’d like to avoid using prefix.