When I teach kotegaeshi, I sometimes have students try it with just the forearm, without touching the hand at all. This forces them to pay more attention to angles, connection to center, and so forth, rather than just hammering on the wrist. And inevitably, when a kotegaeshi doesn't work, it turns out that the person was spending a lot of effort on the wrist, without paying enough attention to geometry, connection, and so on.

So while the name is descriptive as far as it goes, I think it's also misleading, and paying too much attention to the exact translation is probably a distraction from the real goal: developing a kotegaeshi that works.

Katherine