Sugar River Is A Verb

There’s a river near my house called Sugar River. It is not made of sugar and it is not sweet. Somebody, a long time ago, tasted the water or the maples on its banks or just liked the sound, and the name stuck the way names do, which is to say arbitrarily and forever.

I walk along it almost every weekend. For years I would have told you, if you asked, that Sugar River is a thing. A noun. A blue line on a county map. Something you point at the way you point at a parked car. It’s (and I do mean it’s) a river I drink by often and might just kayak down this summer.

Then I learned that in Potawatomi, one of the languages that named this land long before anyone thought to call the water sugar, a bay is not a noun. The word lands closer to “to be a bay.” The water is not sitting in a category. It is doing something. Being a bay is an act the water performs, the way you perform being awake, or being in love.

About seventy percent of Potawatomi words are verbs. In English the number is closer to thirty percent. We took a living, moving, weather-having world and filed most of it under nouns. Rocks, rivers, hills, Saturdays. We turned the world into inventory and then acted surprised when we started treating it like inventory.

Here is what the grammar does to you, quietly, before you notice. And having two daughters, I’m highly sensitive to it now.

When Sugar River is a noun, I am the subject of the sentence and the river is the object. I am the one holding the verb. I walk, I look, I own the riparian rights, I decide. The river just sits there being itself, waiting for me to do something to it or about it. The grammar puts me in charge. It hands me the clipboard.

When Sugar River is a verb, the whole arrangement comes apart. The river is doing something. It was doing it before I got here, in the dark, with no audience, carving the same bank it has been carving since the glaciers left and the meltwater had to go somewhere. It will keep doing it after I am gone and after the county map is a museum object. I am not the subject of that sentence. I am a guy who showed up partway through, stood on the bank for a few hundred afternoons drinking beers, and called it sugar.

That is the part I keep circling. Not that the river deserves my respect, though it might. The smaller, stranger thing: the river does not need me to finish its sentence. I have spent my life inside a grammar that told me I was the one with the verb, the protagonist of the watershed, the one things happen to and through.

And the river, doing its slow patient work in the cold, was never asking. I am the guest. The word “it” was how a temporary visitor talked himself into feeling like the landlord.

I will not pretend this is only a nature thought, because it followed me back to work, amidst my 15 claude projects and flooding LinkedIn feed.

We do the same thing to companies. We make them nouns. We are the leader. We are the platform. We are the category. Every one of those sentences plants a flag and stops moving, and a flag is a thing, and things sit on shelves, and shelves get reorganized.

The brands that harden into nouns are the ones that get carried off by the current while still insisting they are the river. Kodak was a noun. Photography was a verb, and it walked away without them, the way Sugar River would keep flowing if every map in the county burned and the brewery beside it shut down.

The humbling version, the one I actually believe, is that no company is the river. The market was here before you and it is doing something whether or not you show up to narrate it. You are a guest who arrived partway through and got to stand on the bank for a while and call it yours.

That is not a small thing. It is just not the large thing we keep pretending it is.

I still call it Sugar River. The name is wrong and I love it anyway. But lately, when I’m looking out over the bridge, admiring wildlife with my daughters, I try to hold the other grammar in my head at the same time. Not the river. Rivering. Something the water is doing, has been doing, will keep doing, with or without a name, and with or without me there to watch it go by.

Maybe just maybe my daughters use the name as a verb. I promise not to correct them.

Maybe just maybe we did marketing justice by calling it marketing. It sounds right to everyone I say it to, but internally I really am referring to the market as a verb and not the work of a noun.

Stay Positive & Worth Looking Up At The Skying Today