Have had much the same confusion with ENSO, a composite term of (a) El Nino representing a unilateral one side (phase) of the see-saw water temperature and (b) the Southern Oscillation - the bilateral atmospheric pressure shifts responsible for the gradient inducing those very winds of the Walker Circulation that "go both ways" As one person wrote here "... where is La Nina?". Could this quirk of historical timing be corrected by renaming ENSO to ELSOLA that would more intuitively illustrate the alternating nature of both extremes?