When there is no outside left

Not long ago, the people who mixed music for a living in the Gulf were a small group, and they talked like it. They had words for the hiss on a tape, for a vocal sitting too far forward, for the moment a track was ready to leave the room. Using those words correctly was how one engineer recognised another. Nobody explained them, because anyone who needed an explanation was not in the room.

Those words were never really technical. They were a membership card.

Now a teenager in Riyadh can make a whole track on a laptop in his bedroom, with tools that once needed a mixing desk the size of a dining table. He picks up the vocabulary from videos in an afternoon. A month later he has moved on to newer words, ones the old engineers have never heard.

That is what happens to jargon when getting in stops costing years. It no longer marks who belongs, because belonging has become cheap. So it churns. New terms appear, spread and go stale within a season, and nobody holds them long enough for them to mean more than this month.

The people who were there first feel the loss, and it is easy to mistake what they are mourning. It is not the words. It is the edge of the circle. Insider talk only works while someone outside fails to understand it.

Once everyone can walk in, there is nobody left on the other side of the door to talk past.