Things are what we want to know. A child pointing at a bird is not first in love with the word “bird.” The farmer, the nurse, the mechanic, the astronomer are answerable to what is there. If words were only decorations, we would be right to brush them aside and get on with the world.
The modern suspicion of “mere words” often comes from having watched speech used to hide things: slogans, jargon, official language that will not look at the object. “That’s just semantics” is sometimes a protest against a trick. That protest is a kind of honesty. A dispute that is only about the sticker, while the thing sits ignored, is not a serious dispute.
It is also true that we can get lost in definitions and never return to what we were trying to know. People do fuss over wording in order not to look. Anyone who has sat through a meeting of that kind has a right to be impatient with words.
What is true, then, is the primacy of the thing we are trying to know, and the right suspicion of speech that will not look at it. What has not yet been shown is that names are therefore second, or that we can have the things in common without the work of naming them.