Table aliases are a necessary evil when dealing with highly normalized schemas. For example, and I'm not the architect on this DB so bear with me, it can take 7 joins in order to get a clean and complete record back which includes a person's name, address, phone number and company affiliation.
Rather than the somewhat standard single character aliases, I tend to favor short word aliases so the above example's SQL ends up looking like:
select person.FirstName
,person.LastName
,addr.StreetAddress
,addr.City
,addr.State
,addr.Zip
,phone.PhoneNumber
,company.CompanyName
from tblPeople person
left outer join tblAffiliations affl on affl.personID = person.personID
left outer join tblCompany company on company.companyID = affl.companyID
... etc
