I think you said it yourself "indirect self-reference" - its self-describing and doesn't require much explanation. It lets you concentrate on showing why its us

I think you said it yourself "indirect self-reference" - its self-describing and doesn't require much explanation. It lets you concentrate on showing why its useful rather than what it is. It leads naturally to discussions of scope of references in languages that don't make self-reference easy. One reason I think the word becomes confusing is that recursive functions typically also require introducing a recursive data-structures. It makes the teacher feel powerful introducing a special concept but the learner struggles with what feels like a category error - they were trying to understand a processing concept and now its also a property that can apply to static structures too.