What you'll find if you look at Hoon is about 100 combinator runes, which are digraphs like "%=" ("centis") or "|-" ("barhep"). (There is of course a power-law usage distribution -- a few common runes dominate.)
If we had to invent and remember semantic names for each of these runes, that binding would really be a lot of work to remember. We could say "mutate" instead of "centis" and "loop" instead of "barhep". Remembering these bindings would be quite a lot of work.
Of course, we could use reserved words directly; you can experiment with translating Hoon into reserved words. (The earliest experiments used keywords with a sigil, like ":loop".) To my eye the keywords look hideously verbose and are easily confused with symbols.
You also lose the ability to classify, say, "|=" and "|-", as closely related runes. This is especially useful with unusual, rarely used runes; what is "|/"? You might not know, but you know that it starts with "|", so it makes a core.