IV. Adjacent Territory Essay 25
The Noun That Froze a River
Names that hide the process
There is a river near where you live. You know it as a river. It has banks, so it has sides, and it has a source and a mouth, and it begins in one place and ends in another, and it is drawn on maps as a blue line that goes somewhere. You can walk to the bridge. You can put a boat in it. It is a thing with a shape.
What it is not is a thing. It is a process, and it has been running continuously for a very long time, and none of the water in it has ever been there before. The water at the bridge is different water from a year ago. The river is not a container that water passes through. The river is the passing.
And yet you can hold the word, and the word freezes the passing into a thing, and you will go on using the word, and the word will be doing a job that a verb would do better. Nouns are the sharpest tool in language and the most dangerous, and the trouble is that the same property that makes them useful is what makes them misleading.
Take an economy. It is one of the great nouns. There is an economy, it has sectors, it grows or shrinks, it can be in recession, it can be in recovery, it can be described as healthy or fragile, and it can be given a number.
Now say what is actually happening. What is happening is that a great many people are doing a great many things, some of which produce goods, some of which move goods around, some of which teach, some of which maintain the roads. The amount of the stuff being made and the number of people being paid are not the same thing, and the relationship between them changes. When we say the economy grew, we mean a particular set of those activities produced more, or produced the same with less effort, or produced something different that we decided to count instead.
Nothing here is a criticism of the word. The word is a compression that lets you talk about a century of economic activity in three syllables, and the compression keeps the parts that matter for most conversations. But the compression is not neutral. It is a choice about which processes to count and which to leave as background, and once the noun is in place, the choice is invisible, and the background processes become the things that happen in the economy rather than the things the economy consists of.
What a noun freezes
Every noun does two things at once. It names a thing, and it deletes a verb.
When you call something a river, you have deleted the words moving and being carried and being changed by what it passes through. When you call something an economy, you have deleted producing, trading, deciding, and earning. When you call it a school, you have deleted teaching and learning and getting tired. When you call it a family, you have deleted the enormous amount of negotiation, resentment, care, and money that a family actually consists of.
The deletion is not total and it is not even mostly bad. A noun is the most economical thing language has, and without nouns you cannot say anything at all, because you would be saying the whole sentence every time. The useful question is not whether a noun deletes a verb. It is which verb it deletes, and whether the deletion is one you would want to make visible at the moment you are making it.
There is a particular kind of deletion that does real damage, and it is the deletion of a process that somebody is responsible for. "A shortage." "A backlog." "A skills gap." "A housing crisis." Each of these names a situation and deletes the mechanism that produced it, and the mechanism is usually the thing you would need to know in order to do anything about it. A shortage of what, produced by what, caused by what, changeable by whom. The noun has already answered none of these, and has answered them by making the question unnecessary.
What if you replaced the nouns with verbs everywhere you could? A shortage becomes a process of running out. A backlog becomes a queue that is not being served. A skills gap becomes a person not being taught something they need. The result is much less fluent and considerably more useful, because a verb has a doer in it. You can ask who is doing the running out and how they might stop, and you cannot ask that of a shortage.
Now change the condition. What if you said it in a report, in a meeting, in a conversation with a person who is tired? "The supply chain is not keeping up with the change in demand" is a sentence somebody can act on. "There is a supply chain issue" is a sentence that lets everybody in the room go back to their desks. The verbose version is slower, and it is also the version that keeps the mechanism in the room where the decisions happen.
"Naming a thing is a small act and does not change how you see it." The name is not small, because the name is a compression and the compression is a selection. People who use the same nouns about the same situation will end up in the same places, because the nouns have already narrowed what can be said. This is not a claim that language determines thought. It is a much smaller and more defensible claim: that the words you have available limit the thoughts you find easy to have, in the same way that the tools you have available limit the jobs you find easy to do.
The other misconception: "if you just use better words the problem goes away." Using better words is a real tool and it is not a cure. You can describe a housing shortage in vivid, process-rich language and still not have done anything about it. The words change what is visible, and what is visible is a precondition for action, not a substitute for it.
What gets rearranged
Here is where a hidden process stops being a lost detail and starts being a wrong answer.
A process has a shape, and the shape has an order. Supply comes before price. A person is taught before they are skilled. A queue forms before it is served. Draw that shape as a set of boxes and arrows and it is impossible to rearrange the boxes without changing what the diagram means. Now name each box with a noun: supply, demand, price. And now you have three nouns, and nouns have no order. You can put demand first, or price first, and it still looks like a sentence about an economy, and now the economy has been rearranged by a change of subject that nobody made deliberately.
This is why the noun feels neutral and is not. The word supplies a shape and the process supplies a shape, and they are different shapes, and the noun is the one that survives the conversation, because it is the one everybody can use. The process requires more words and more agreement about what is meant by each word, and the noun requires none.
When to keep the noun
It would be a mistake to read this as an argument for verbs. Nouns are right most of the time, and the cases where they are right are worth knowing.
Use the noun when the process is settled. When you say the bus, the process of the bus is not in question, and replacing it with a description of its operation every time you mention it would be a kind of pedantry. Use the noun when the process varies and the thing does not. When you are talking about a stable object, the object is the right handle.
Use the noun when precision is more important than mechanism, which is often the case in law, in contracts, in specifications, and in teaching children the names of things. A specification that says a door shall open outwards is using a noun correctly, because the point is the requirement, and the mechanism is somebody else's business.
And be suspicious of the noun when you notice it doing work in a sentence where it is doing a lot. "There is a problem with communication." That sentence is not naming a thing. It is a container for a disagreement that has not been had yet, and it will go on being said until somebody is asked what the communication is supposed to do.
Limits
This essay is about a feature of language, and it is worth being careful about how strong a claim is being made. Words do not determine thought. People with the same vocabulary think different things, and people with very different vocabularies think the same things, and the vocabulary you learn at fifteen does not lock in the ideas you have at fifty. What vocabulary does is change what is easy to notice, and noticing is most of what thinking about a situation consists of.
Second limit: the process that a noun hides is often deliberately hidden, by people with power. "Industrial action" is a noun phrase, and it has done a lot of work for employers over a century. This essay is not a claim that anyone can be got at by changing their vocabulary, because some of the hiding is deliberate and deliberate hiding responds to being pointed at rather than to being rephrased.
Third limit: the case of a river is a case where the noun is probably right. A river is a stable enough feature of the world to be named, and a person who insisted on calling it a process of transport would be making a point rather than a description. The question is always whether the freezing is doing useful work, and the answer changes with the conversation.
Stuck
You are stuck at the abstract level with language when your description of a situation keeps turning into a list of things, and the things keep not helping. You have a spreadsheet of nouns. You have said that the problem is, in effect, one noun after another, and you have not moved.
The way out is to find the verb. Take the situation and write one sentence about what is happening, with somebody doing it. Not what exists, what is happening, and who is doing it. It will be longer and less elegant and it will contain the thing you were missing, because the thing you were missing is always a mechanism, and mechanisms have actions in them.
Sources
- The observation that nominalisations hide processes is a long standing theme in linguistics and in the study of technical and bureaucratic writing. No specific author, book, or quotation is cited here.
- Reification, treating an abstraction as a concrete thing, is discussed in an earlier essay on this site and is used here in a related but distinct sense.
- All examples are ordinary and hypothetical, and no claim is made here about any particular organisation or public policy.