I'm not sure I'm quite settled with the use of terminology here, I think 'self-clearing' is ambiguous - at least I'm unsure what 'clearing' means in this case.

The Backbone docs are a bit more clear-cut for me:

> Creates and returns a new debounced version of the passed function which will postpone its execution until after *wait* milliseconds have elapsed since the last time it was invoked. Useful for implementing behavior that should only happen after the input has stopped arriving.

I really like the sentence "Useful for implementing behavior that should only happen after the input has stopped arriving.' which can be extended with your example.