They kinda got me when they said the maths works but only if there's ten dimensions plus time.

I mean, I always considered the "strings" to be the best word we have to give us some real world sense of what we're talking about. Loops are as much mathematical constructs as physical realities, you can see a mathematical loop with i. The word "loop" means something, just like "string". But these words are 1d to us, in the stringy quantum world they're presumably 10d, so of course the words we use are flawed. I think the word "brane" is short for "membrane", which is essentially a quantum field, no?