I just did this grep for single-character function names on the Mako codebase:

    grep -r '\<[a-z](' .

And there were no matches. There were some one-character macros but they were macros repeated dozens of times in a localized area.

It seems like what's being proposed is descriptive function names with simple variable names. If the function bodies are short enough (e.g. fit on a single screen) then this seems like a good trade-off to me. IOW, the variable names are symbolic but the function names are descriptive.

The short variable names should be clear enough if you understand the purpose of the function.