One day in Ms. Philips’s class, a young boy named Alfred White stood up and said something that should have changed how we see ourselves forever. But mostly, we just keep sitting down and accepting the old lesson.
Ms. Philips had been teaching the traditional rules: nouns are persons, places, or things. They are solid, independent, permanent. Verbs are merely actions—something a noun does. When she asked Alfred whether people are nouns or verbs, he looked around at his classmates breathing, thinking, changing, and said what should be obvious: “People are verbs.”
She told him to sit down. He was wrong. People are nouns.
And she was right. By the rules of grammar and the inherited logic of Western thought, she was absolutely right. A person is a noun. The syllogism holds: nouns are persons; people are persons; therefore, people are nouns. Case closed.
Except it isn’t. And that’s the problem.
The Paradox That Should Unsettle Us
Here’s what makes this more than a classroom debate: both of them are correct, and we’ve been living inside the damage of choosing the wrong one.
Ms. Philips is correct abstractly. In everyday language, in law, in how we’ve organized Western thought since Aristotle, we treat the world as a collection of fixed substances that possess changing attributes. A chair remains a chair even when you paint it. A person remains a person even when their moods shift, their body ages, their mind changes. This abstraction is useful. It lets us sign contracts, file taxes, and speak about ourselves as if there’s some solid core that persists.
But Alfred was correct fundamentally. And he was pointing at something that, if we truly understood it, would transform how we treat ourselves and each other.
Alfred saw what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (yes, their names were similar) spent his life proving: reality is not made of static matter. It’s made of events—continuous, flowing, creative moments of becoming. You are not a permanent noun that occasionally performs actions. You are a sustained sequence of experiences, each one building on the last, each one reshaping what comes next.
You do not have a life. You are a living process.
Why This Matters More Than Grammar
The shift from noun to verb is not semantic. It is existential. And it carries profound moral weight.
When we treat people as nouns—as fixed, solid things—we create the conditions for harm. We solidify them. We say: “That’s just who you are.” We mark them. We decide what they are capable of. We say someone is “a failure,” “damaged,” “not smart enough,” “too fat,” “too broken.” And because we’ve accepted the grammar of nouns, we treat these as descriptions of fixed reality rather than temporary conditions that can be transformed through experience and action.
Think about what happens in schools, workplaces, families, and the wider world when we treat people as nouns:
- A child is labeled “shy” and becomes a noun—a fixed category. Instead of seeing a young verb in the process of becoming more confident, we cement them into a role.
- An employee makes a mistake and is marked as “unreliable” or “unsuitable.” Those nouns follow them. We stop seeing the continuous process of learning and adjustment; we see a fixed flaw.
- A person carries weight, and society decides they are a noun labeled “obese”—a person whose whole identity is a permanent category, a fixed thing. And with that noun comes exclusion, stigmatization, and moral judgment that the culture attaches to it.
Western culture is built on the grammar of nouns. And nouns are very good at staying put. They don’t change. They don’t become. They are.
The Social Cost of Seeing Verbs
Here’s what frightens people about accepting Alfred’s truth: if people are verbs, then change is not optional. Growth is not a choice we make; it’s the nature of what we are. And that means we cannot hide in the safety of “that’s just how I am.”
But there’s something even more unsettling: if people are verbs—if we are all continuous processes of becoming—then the ways we’ve divided the world into fixed categories start to crack. The hierarchies we’ve built on the assumption that some people are by nature certain kinds of nouns (smarter, better, more worthy, less worthy) lose their foundation.
This is why breaking from the grammar of nouns is dangerous. Not dangerous to your person, but dangerous to social structures that depend on people staying fixed, staying in their place, staying in their noun.
Question the noun “woman,” and gender structures tremble. Question the noun “poor,” and economic hierarchies have to explain themselves. Question the noun “fat,” and the entire beauty industrial complex and bariatric centers have to defend themselves. Treat people as verbs—as continuous, creative processes with the capacity to become—and suddenly the social constructions that have defined them become visible, questionable, optional.
That is why, despite everything young Alfred understood, despite everything Whitehead wrote, we still sit down when we’re told we are wrong. Staying in the grammar of nouns feels safer. It means we know where we fit. It means certain groups (nouns) have permission to define those who have no voice. A noun worldview becomes a weapon of power, giving certain persons, at certain intersections of privilege, the power to extend their privilege and deny it to others. Understanding who we are begins with language and the words we use.
The Liberation of Verbs
Here’s what we lose when we accept the noun and refuse the verb: freedom.
When you understand yourself as a verb, as a continuous process of becoming, something shifts. The past doesn’t determine you—it feeds into you. Your experiences, your mistakes, your failures, your conditioning—these do not have to define who you are. They are the material you are working with right now, in this moment, as you create the next version of yourself. They are the gifting (verb) of our past and present to our becoming.
This is not magical thinking. You cannot wish away the consequences of your past. Your body still carries what it carries. Your relationships still bear the marks of what happened. But the grammar changes. Instead of “I am broken,” you can say, “I am in a process of healing.” Instead of “I am a failure,” you can say, “I am learning from what didn’t work.”
The verb makes room for agency (e.g., the capacity to act; to make choices that shape what comes next). It makes room for the future. It makes room for change that doesn’t require you to violently reject who you’ve been, but rather to integrate what you’ve experienced into who you’re becoming.
The Ethics of Seeing Each Other as Verbs
Here’s the most important part: how we see others shapes how we treat them.
If you see someone as a noun—a fixed, complete, unchangeable thing—you are not looking at them. You are looking at your judgment of them, your category for them, your conclusion about them. You have stopped seeing a person and started seeing a label.
But if you see someone as a verb, as a continuous process of becoming, you are forced into a different kind of attention. You have to stay present. You have to notice what they’re doing right now, not what they did last year or what you’ve decided they are. You have to hold space for the possibility that they are not the same today as they were yesterday. You have to extend the courtesy that you would want extended to yourself: the assumption that you are more than your past, more than your current limitations, more than the categories assigned to you.
This is what forgiveness means. This is what it means to give someone a second chance. This is what dignity actually looks like—not a noun you possess or don’t possess, but a verb you enact, a continuous choice to recognize in yourself and in others the reality of becoming.
The Choice Alfred Tried to Teach Us
Ms. Philips was not wrong about the grammar. The traditional logic holds. By the rules of abstract language, people are nouns.
But Alfred was right about something deeper: the rules of abstract language do not describe the deepest truth of what we are.
We are verbs that leave a trail of nouns. Our past actions, our bodies, our memories, our relationships—these are the nouns, the solid facts we’ve created through our becoming. But the living, breathing, choosing you right now is always a verb. An active, creative agent. A continuous process. A becoming.
The question is not whether this is true in some abstract philosophical sense. The question is whether we have the courage to live as if it is.
Because once you see yourself as a verb—once you truly grasp that you are not a fixed thing but an ongoing process of creation—you cannot treat yourself or anyone else the way the nouns have taught you to.
You have to become responsible for your becoming. You have to grant others the space to become. And you have to stop sitting down when the old grammar tells you that you, or they, are already complete, already defined, already fixed.
Ms. Philips had the final word in that classroom. But Alfred had the truth.
The only question now is: which one will you choose to believe?
