> Are there psychotic devs out there who call it something other than `self`? Yuck!

I have, under duress. It was a result of using syntactic sugar wrapping a PHP website to make a Python API; it was convenient to pass form variables into a generic handler method of a class. The problem? The website, fully outside of my control, had a page which had an input named "self" which resulted in two values for that argument. Rather than refactor the class and dozens of scripts that depended on it, I renamed 'self' to 's_lf' in that one function and called it a day.

Also, python has class methods. The convention is to use 'cls' in that context, to avoid confusing the parameter (a class) with an instance of that class.