[jimjimjim]

There should always be a balance between brevity and being too verbose.

all single letters = bad, java style thisIsALoopCounter = bad.

and in the c world i is almost universally understood to be used as a loop counter and index. If I came across 'count' in a c code I (briefly) might think it was related to a count of items in an array or similar.

[dsfuoi]

I agree. The problem is that those single character names get abused and you end up with code that consists only of them, including the function arguments, which is the worst.