Sports heroes don't always live up to their names. In a slump, they will say: "This is not who I am."
Same thing in scandals and criminal cases. "He/she isn't like that. He's not that kind of person." "I wasn't myself. Don't know what came over me."
In fact, action always comes first. You get to be a "name" by the great (or terrible) things that you do. The great last-minute game-winning quarterback; the clutch home-run hitter.
"Big stars are big in big games." Sports commentators, whose job is to stir up enthusiasm about watching the upcoming event, often say this. In fact, the sentence is entirely made up of nouns and adjectives describing them. The only verb is a tense of "to be", which is not an active verb but only a copula or connection. What happens in time becomes frozen in nouns.
The confusion of nouns with verbs explains why great teams don't last. They become great because some of their players perform dramatic actions. This makes them famous names; which enables them to negotiate long contracts at high salaries. Some executives of professional teams see the flaw in process, but there are always other teams that will take past stars at exorbitant terms. They may perform well enough, in the aggregate, to make owners and fans happy. But their aging players aren't as good as they were when they made their reputation. (see: 2026 Dodgers, Mets, Yankees; a revolving list of NFL teams; World Cup teams.) Eventually, the financial strain gets to be too high, and you have the worst case scenario of high salaries, high expectations, and mediocre (i.e. statistically average) performance. One player made headlines by saying, honestly and perceptively, that you get paid by what you did in the past. He was lambasted for telling the truth.
In reality, the great teams are those that don't rely on their stars, but keep bringing in new players. This pattern happens over and over in crucial baseball games: the players at the bottom of the lineup get the key hits, start rallies, score the winning runs. The hero is someone who doesn't have a big name. Why? Because the opposing pitchers and the attention of the defense is on getting the stars out ("Don't let their big guys beat you," the commentator says before the game.) When they succeed, this gives a sense of false confidence, letting down against the "less dangerous" players; which is why those are the ones who win the game. You could make money betting on hitters at the bottom of the lineup.
Nevertheless, it is hard to get away from the domination of nouns over verbs. For two reasons:
Fans are enthusiastic about names. It is the names of the stars they have heard about that attracts them to watch the games. Seeing them in person, along with huge numbers of other people, constitutes a large-scale Interaction Ritual. This is the archetype of creating sacred objects, a quasi-religious aura that clings to whoever is in the center of attention of a crowd, sharing the feeling of contagious emotion-- whether for the dramatic situation or just the sheer excitement of seeing someone famous. Like all high-intensity IRs, the memory of the sacred object acts like an emotional battery, bringing back the original feeling. Excitement attaches to the name of the star. What they did becomes who they are. The Interaction Ritual of audience experience turns verbs into nouns.
A second reason:
Nouns are the core of language. Although the world consists mainly (in science, entirely) of processes, happenings, doings, it is hard to say anything about the centrality of verbs without falling back on nouns. Reading the last two sentences, I see that almost all of it consists of nouns and their modifiers-- exceptions being "hard to say" and "without falling back". When I refer to the active doing of "things" (damn, another noun!) I take the easy path and say "processes, happenings, doings," -- noun forms of "happen" and "do". Verbs easily and unconsciously turn into nouns: run -- running; dance -- dancing, dancer. To read something becomes "a good read." Language can also work in the opposite direction: watching birds becomes "bird-watching" and then "birding."
In the ancient history of languages, verbs may have come earlier. "Intelligence, intellect, intellectual" are from Latin, intellego, to understand. You are really only intelligent as long as you understand, each new time after time, not because you have intelligence or call yourself an intellectual.
(For Marxists and educated Europeans generally, what was important was belonging to the intelligensia, rather than some other class-- Marxism was big on labelling everybody into nouns. This is ironic because it originated in dialectics, an attempt to get away from seeing the world as a rigidity of nouns. And why post-modernism, which also was trying to create a language that escapes from fixed nouns, lumped Marxism in with the "Modernism" it was rejecting. Postmodernist writing style illustrates how difficult it is to do this.)
Getting back to famous names: when someone does something impressive, doing things (here we go again) that impress us, we say they have "talent". If they did something impressive in the past but not recently, we say they "haven't lived up to their talent" or "haven't developed their talent." Training camps, acting schools, art schools, and entertainment agents make their money out of this kind of talk. (Bear in mind here that the word "talent" comes from an ancient word meaning a large unit of money.)
If what someone does is really amazing, we use the word "genius". This implies that it comes from some mysterious innate quality. As a speech act, using the word "genius" is just a way of saying I can't even try to explain it. Intellectually, this is very minor league; in fact the sociology of creativity is quite good at explaining people who get called "genius."
A better word would be "skill," since this implies that high-level performing can be learned. It is easy to illustrate this in the history of composers. Mozart, who was a child prodigy for playing the piano at age 6, wrote 14 operas before composing his big hits when he was in his 30s. And this is generally the case with all composers whose music continues to be played after they are dead: although they often start performing music and trying to compose in childhood, they undergo years of training until breaking out usually in the early 20s, with their biggest hits written in their 30s or 40s. This in itself is a puzzle: why don't they use up their best tunes early on? Why do they keep on getting better? A "great composer" means a lifetime of finding a skill that will give you a distinct identity from all the other composers as you enter into history. In painting too; Van Gogh painted for 10 years, but his famous paintings come from new technique in the last two years of his life.
Okay, so the world of human beings is mostly about what they do, rather than the names we label them with. But what about things that really are things-- mountains, river valleys, oceans, trees, houses, cars, tables and chairs? These are noun-like because they keep the same shape and location in space, for some extended period of time. But low mountains were once high mountains; coast-lines change; trees grow and fall over. A philosophical conundrum: if your car gets a new paint job, is it the same car? If the engine is replaced? If the body is replaced? The state license bureau may say it's the same if it has the same number; but that is a bureaucracy whose job is to assemble a list of nouns. ID numbers are another kind of noun.
The different realms of the world can be put in a continuum of more noun-like or more verb-like:
Human society is most verb-like. Most of its contents-- people, social roles, organizations-- change in stretches of time in minutes, days, years or decades: Friend /lover /spouse /ex-. Manager /boss /CEO /owner. Employee /unemployed /retired /homeless. A business morphs into a corporation or goes bankrupt; gets taken over, renamed, rebranded, spun off. Just try making a tally of these kinds of changes for people that you know and organizations that you know about; and see how long it takes for it to change.
The biological world changes at a medium rate; but more predictably than humans, over the months; for some plants, over a span of decades. It is visibly verb-like, although most of it is labelled by nouns. Spring and Fall, though, must have started out as verbs.
The physical world is most noun-like. Its biggest parts change over centuries, millenia, eons. But according to physics, everything material consists of sub-atomic particles moving in mostly empty space. It just seems noun-like to us, because our eyes can't see at that level. Which resembles the dilemma of language: we can put together sentences that explain why the world is made out of verb-processes, but we have to do it using a lot of nouns.
One more topic: God makes more sense as a verb than as a noun. The history of Christianity and Islam have been full of controversies over to what extent God can be referred to as a person. Theologians have argued about God as substance, or beyond all substances; a sacred name, or a name that cannot be uttered. Buddhism and Hinduism have had a similar range of arguments; Buddhism with a tendency to argue that the world of name-and-form is an illusion but that enligtenment is to understand it in its wordlessness; some forms of Hinduism trying to depict the moving force of holy beings as dancers with multiple arms and legs.
A favorite argument for atheism is that God as a person who is omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect is contradicted by the realities of history. The argument that God is a substance, or the Form of all forms, is a conceptual abstraction remote from religious experience. But "God" as a verb-- hard to put this into words-- is closer to what people who are religious are talking about, or relating to. Or doing.
Don't take my word for it. I am only a sociologist, and historian of philosophy, trying to sum up what we seriously know, about the human use of verbs and nouns.
