[Alas Babylon!]

Here’s an example from every day speaking:

“In English, recursion is often used to create expressions that modify or change the meaning of one of the elements of the sentence. For example, to take the word nails and give it a more specific meaning, we could use an object relative clause such as that Dan bought, as in

Hand me the nails that Dan bought.

In this sentence, the relative clause that Dan bought (which could be glossed as Dan bought the nails) is contained within a larger noun phrase: the nails (that Dan bought (the nails)). So the relative clause is nested within a larger phrase, kind of like a stack of bowls.”(Matthew J. Traxler, Introduction to Psycholinguistics: Understanding Language Science. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)

[gleeaikin]

Or even more to point of survival: “Hand me your extra spear so we can circle around both sides of the herd and kill that small mammoth nearest the rock pile. Does that example work?

[sparklite2]

like a stack of bowls.

---

...which is a phrase used by linguists
to mean someone is a crackpot, i.e.,
“psycho-ceramic.”

[NorthMountain]

Ha! The example of recursion that you provided illustrates the concept perfectly.

I just had never heard it called “recursion” before.