Understanding the Postgres Hackers Mailing List Language Reading an established open-source project's developer mailing list may leave new contributors wishing they had a decoder ring. Greg Sabino Mullane has written up a valuable https://www.crunchydata.com/blog/understanding-the-postgres-hackers-mailing-list for those new to the PostgreSQL hackers (https://www.postgresql.org/list/pgsql-hackers/ ) mailing list that may also be useful for decoding other lists as well: The mailing lists are full of acronyms and jargon that might not be familiar to younger people who did not grow up on email (although text messages have inherited many of the abbreviations). If you are a non-native English speaker, or under the age of 30, or not steeped in the world of tech, I offer some solutions below. To do this, I downloaded the last year's worth of hackers email, wrote a program to strip out all the non-human stuff (headers, code blocks, attachments, etc.), and then did some data analysis on the results. https://lwn.net/Articles/987892/