Bear in mind that often the reason Haskell code uses one-letter names (and this is possibly true for the other MLs) is that your types can be so generic that you can write useful functions without knowing what you're working on. In such situations, `x` is just as good as `thing`, as far as names are concerned.

As for the operators: they are a visual language. We do not speak our punctuation aloud in English, and we use small marks to guide the reader's eye. Often, Haskell operators as similar, and there is a definite pattern.

f $ x means "f applied to x"

f <$> x means "map f over x"

In general, the <> around an operator lifts it to work over a structure. Similarly:

x & f means "f applied to x"

x <&> f means "map f over x"

For the applicative operators like <star>, star> and <star (where "star" should be an asterisk but I can never work out the formatting on this forum), the operators "point" at the values being retained. And so on.