I'm trying to translate some gnarly physics equations over to Mathematica for easier exploration / manipulation / etc, and I'm running into a problem when it comes to variable names like 
.
In particular, these sorts of variable names are enormously convenient when writing equations and doing derivations by hand, but Mathematica seems to insist on treating the <parallel> symbol as an infix operator, causing it to produce errors.
Is there any way to override that behavior and tell Mathematica to treat the whole thing as a single, atomic symbol, or am I stuck with the undesirable and much less readable 
?
The latter becomes especially cumbersome when I've got complicated equations with many expressions involving subscripts like "parallel", "perpendicular", etc. Doubly so when I've already got those expressions, using those symbols, in offline form in pen-and-paper notes.
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