I don't care that he named his variables after women. What I do care about is that he named very temporary variables longer than a single character. 'n' and 'i' suffice and anything else is just pretentious.
If you want to be descriptive, name the purpose of the loop variable. If it's an array of foos or an array named foo, then use something like fooIx. Then when you loop over an array of bars, use something like barIx. If you're counting retries, call it retryIx or retryCt (or something that describes what you're retrying, like loginAttemptIx).
Depending on the context, i may be fine. However, a single-character name like that is bound to be reused, which is a bad smell.
foo
bar
baz
In that order