My point is that naming verbosity depends on the code. This is vague but better than saying "cf. Goldilocks" ("choose anything between two crazy extremes"). My other point is that everyday use of names should be a guide for naming in code. The reason Mama Bear is wrong is that she's too formal. She gives a full explanation of the variable each time, but the 'full explanation' is the responsibility of the var setters, not of the name.

Your Momma Bear either misses the last days of several months, or counts extra days. It also fails to count the LastMonthOfYear. Your Baby Bear is nothing like your Momma Bear, though you seem to be refactoring. Momma counts entire months (look at the variable names, last day of month), Baby does something like "sum the totals from the first five days of Feb-May". These are naming bugs, they aren't irrelevant.

The naming depends on the code. If we're iterating a 3d array and the vars are set directly above, Papa Bear is readable and I wouldn't dick around with it (it might be a convention in the codebase).

  // baby bear
  for(y=firstY; y<=lastY; y++)
    for(m=firstM; m<=lastM; m++)
      for(d=firstD; d<=lastD; d++)
        sum += getDailyTotals(y,m,d); // line 4

I'm not writing tutorials here. If you don't understand y, m, d in lines 1-3 (especially having seen line 4), you probably haven't been working with dates enough to be messing with this code anyway.

I'm not saying you should choose single variable names, I'm saying they're sometimes ok, and that it's not as simple as "choose names with 4-8 characters".