Goh Ling Yong : The Day I Became Fluent in a Language That No Longer Exists - Goh Ling Yong
The question came during a sprint planning meeting at my new job, a place of beige walls and sensible project names like “Q3-Client-Portal-Update.” Someone asked for an estimate on a tricky data migration task. Before my brain could engage its corporate translation filter, my mouth started to form the words, “Well, if we want to avoid another Chimera, we should probably budget a full two weeks.”
The words died on my lips. A ghost of a syllable. I looked around the conference table at the polite, unfamiliar faces. They would have just nodded, confused. Chimera? Was that a new framework? A server name? The silence hung in the air for only a second before I recovered. “I mean, to avoid a complex integration mess,” I clarified, the generic phrase feeling clumsy and hollow.
In that moment, I felt a pang so sharp and specific it was almost physical. It was the loneliness of a native speaker in a foreign land. I had just tried to speak a language that, for all practical purposes, no longer exists. A language I am fluent in. A language whose only other speakers are now scattered across a dozen different companies, speaking in beige tones about their own client portal updates.
The language had no official name, but we all knew it. It was the dialect of Oakhaven, the startup where I had spent the last four years of my life. It was a lexicon built from inside jokes, catastrophic bugs, late-night breakthroughs, and the shared, desperate hope of building something from nothing.
The Grammar of a Shared World
Every company has its jargon, its acronyms. But this was different. This wasn't just shorthand; it was a form of institutional memory, a living record of our trials and triumphs. You couldn’t learn it from an onboarding document. You had to live it.
Project Chimera was our first attempt to stitch together three legacy systems from an early acquisition. It was a monster of mismatched code, a multi-headed beast that nearly devoured the engineering team. To mention its name was to invoke a cautionary tale, a collective shudder. It meant, Don’t get cocky. Remember how bad it can get.
We had verbs. To “Marcus” a feature meant to over-engineer a simple solution with breathtaking, unnecessary elegance. It was named after Marcus, our brilliant and deeply beloved principal engineer who once spent three weeks building a micro-service architecture for a button that just needed to say “Hello, World.” It was a term of endearment, a gentle ribbing that also meant, Let’s be pragmatic this time.
We had places, both real and metaphorical. “The Garden” was the beautifully refactored, well-documented corner of our codebase, a serene place we all aspired to work in. “The Swamp,” by contrast, was the tangled, debt-ridden legacy code we only waded into when absolutely necessary, usually in pairs and with emotional support. A junior developer’s first solo ticket in The Swamp was a rite of passage.
This language was the connective tissue of our team. It was the password that proved you belonged. When we interviewed new candidates, we weren’t just listening for technical skills; we were listening for their ability to grasp the nuances. A new hire’s first tentative, correct use of a term like “Ouroboros ticket”—a bug that causes another bug that, when fixed, reintroduces the first—was a moment of quiet celebration. It meant they were one of us now. They were learning to speak Oakhaven.
It was a language of efficiency, yes, but more than that, it was a language of trust. To say, “This has a real ‘Red Flag Friday’ vibe,” was to communicate a whole paragraph of concern in a single breath. It meant: I have a bad feeling about this, I can’t fully articulate it yet, but our shared history tells me we need to stop and listen to this intuition before we proceed. It was a vulnerability and a strength, all wrapped up in a silly, alliterative name for a meeting we held every week, without fail.
The Fading of the Light
Languages die slowly, then all at once. The first sign was the arrival of the consultants. They came in with their own sterile dialect of “synergies,” “deliverables,” and “value-adds.” They’d sit in our meetings, faces blank as we debated whether the new feature was more of an Icarus or a Bedrock.
Project Icarus was our code for any ambitious, beautiful, and probably doomed-to-fail moonshot. Project Bedrock was the unglamorous but essential foundational work. The distinction was vital. It framed our entire risk calculus. But to the consultants, it was gibberish.
“Could we perhaps use more standardized project naming conventions?” one of them asked one day, after our CEO had to spend five minutes translating the Icarus/Bedrock debate.
The request was reasonable. It was also a death knell.
Slowly, our lexicon began to be papered over with corporate gray. Red Flag Friday was renamed the “Weekly Risk Assessment.” The Ouroboros tickets were just logged as “regressions.” We stopped calling Marcus’s work “Marcusing” and started calling it “scope creep.” Each replacement was a small erasure, a sanding down of our unique identity. The color was draining from our world.
The jokes became less frequent. The old stories were told less often. There was a quiet, creeping formality. We were no longer a tribe speaking our own tongue; we were just employees. The language of Oakhaven began its retreat from the meeting rooms and Slack channels into the private DMs and whispered conversations by the coffee machine. It became a language of quiet resistance, a memory of a time when we felt like we were all building the same thing, together.
Then came the final all-hands meeting. The one where the CEO, his voice thick with a sorrow that no corporate dialect could conceal, announced that our funding had run out. We were shutting down. Effective immediately.
The air went out of the room. In the silence that followed, I looked across at my team. There were no words, in any language, that could capture the feeling. We had spent years building a shared world, a shared reality, and in an instant, it was slated for demolition. We were being evicted from our own culture. The last speakers of a dying tongue, about to be scattered to the winds.
An Elegy for a Vocabulary
It’s been a year now. We all found new jobs. We send memes to the old Oakhaven group chat, which is mostly dormant. Every few months, a few of us will get a drink, and for an hour or two, the old language comes roaring back to life.
We’ll laugh about the time Marcus tried to build a neural network to sort the recycling. We’ll reminisce about the sheer terror of deploying a Chimera patch on a Friday afternoon. We’ll speak in our old shorthand, a flurry of terms and names that would mean nothing to anyone else in the bar. It feels like coming home.
But there’s a bittersweet edge to it now. This knowledge, this fluency I worked so hard to acquire, is useless in the real world. It’s like knowing all the constellations in a sky that is no longer visible. It’s a set of keys to a house that was torn down.
Sometimes, in a meeting at my new, sensible job, I’ll find myself mentally translating. Ah, this is a Bedrock project. This guy is totally Marcusing the problem. We need a Red Flag Friday about this, stat. The thoughts are automatic, vestigial. They are the ghosts of a cognitive framework I can no longer use.
I am fluent in the language of a place that doesn't exist.
It’s a quiet kind of grief. There’s no funeral for a company culture. There are no monuments to a shared vocabulary. All that’s left is the faint echo in the minds of the people who were there. And the sudden, sharp pang of loneliness when you almost speak a word of it out loud, only to remember that no one would understand.
But I wouldn’t trade the fluency for anything. It’s a scar, but it’s a beautiful one. It proves I was part of something. We built a world, and that world had a language, and for a short, brilliant time, I was a native speaker. That language may be dead, but the fact that it existed at all—the fact that we needed it, that we built it together, word by painful, hilarious, wonderful word—is a testament to the reality that for a while there, we weren’t just a startup. We were a tribe. And that’s a story worth remembering, in any language.
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