Where do you draw the line then? Stopping at `tau` just because `$future_maintainer` might get confused feels like an arbitrary limit to me.

What about something like `gamma`? Lorentz factor? Luminance multiplier? Factorial generalization?

Why not just use the full sentence rather than assign it to an arbitrary name/symbol `gamma` and leave it dependent on the context?

And it's not that hard to add an inline comment to dispel the confusion

  const tau = 2*pi; // Alternate name for 2pi is "tau"