The case of the prematurely freed SKB

Yes, really. These things are used a lot. Common words tend to be shorter than uncommon word, and for good reason. Less wasted space for example.
It doesn't really matter what the letters are as long as they are used consistently.
If you made a convention that "thing_foo" incremented the ref count and returned the pointer, and "thing_bar" decremented the refcount and discarded when it became zero, then we would all add "_foo" and "_bar" to our language fairly quickly and there would be no confusion.
I could argue that would be better than the current situation where we mostly use "get" and "put", but they don't always mean quite the same thing.

When new people come to the code and see "get" and "put" it might seem like it makes it easy for them. But it can just as easily lead them to think they understand something that they don't. Using more letters might just give them more confidence that the meaning of the word is "obvious", which is probably isn't.