I'm not sure why : has been chosen as the canonical fork bomb function name, but it's more readable with something like

resurse() { recurse | recurse &}; recurse

In this example, the poor readability is a feature. Nevertheless the ":" character is bash inner function, which tells the shell to do nothing (except the arguments expansion), like pass in python. This means that you can redefine it and use it to confuse others. Most of other special characters are not functions so you are not able to redefine them that easily.

And it's usually accompanied by the adjective "elegant", which I find rather baffling.

"Cute" or "cryptic", perhaps.

Confuse the computer by making it sad?

haha yes I can see it now. Its a bash function that gets called recursively. Nice and simple, I've tested it in a few different environments, linux 2.4, linux 2.6, open bsd, solaris. All vanilla installs. Solaris is the only one I havent seen die.