A quick grep on the 3.7 branch indicates that the standard documentation includes each of the terms "magic method" and "special method" about the same number of times.  (I didn't check for instances that wrapped lines.)

Perhaps we should decide on just one of these terms and fix references that use the other.  I agree this can be a source of confusion, but having two terms for the same concept is a bug.

I don't think we need to change references to "the __something__ method", because those are specific.  We only need to decide on and consistently use the categorical term for these methods when referring to the entire category.