Personally, I can stand abbreviations so long as they're pronounceable. I think phonetic syllable-granularity abbreviations are an optimal tradeoff. argumentVector is silly to be writing in full all the time but argv is infuriating.

When I parse code I'm mentally reading to myself, so argv is deplorable gibberish that has to be translated to "arg-vee". It's like traveling over rocky ground, one step is easy enough but over a distance it really slows you down. argvec saves almost as many letters, is way more readable, abbreviates both words down to the same scale, carries more semantic meaning through for a newbie, etc.

Some English words can't be phonetically abbreviated and I think those are better off written in full.