“I’ve been wondering for a while now why everyone keeps calling it a ‘recovery’ at all!!?”
It’s economics jargon, with a more or less precise formal technical definition. If the economy has negative growth (whatever that stupid term means; it’s not growth if it’s negative, it’s shrinkage) for two consecutive quarters, or whatever, according to whatever official measure they use, we’re in a recession. If it stops shrinking, we’re in recovery.
Doesn’t matter how many people are unemployed, how much we’re inflating, how many sectors of the economy are still shrinking, etc. So long as the macroeconomy has stopped getting worse, they call it “recovery.”
This is why we have a "jobless recovery." There has been no real economic growth, and the reported increase in GDP is nothing more than a false positive.
The press may not report it this way, but the people instinctively feel it, even if they know nothing about economics.