Things are what we want to know, the natures of things, their properties, causes, etc. A child pointing at a bird is not primarily for the love of the word “bird.” The farmer, the nurse, the mechanic, the astronomer have to deal with what is there, with things. If words were just decorative, we would be right to have no reason to consider them first or in detail.
The modern suspicion of “mere words” often comes from having watched words and language be used either actively to hide things or passively to hide them by cloaking them in words that obscure an important reality of some kind. Things like slogans, jargon, official language that will not look at the object, these all can lead us to think a concern for words and definitions is “just semantics.” Sometimes, that is quite true. A dispute that is only about the label itself, while the thing is 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. It is always a temptation to consider words rather than to study things themselves; this is especially true of modern historically minded disciplines where the concern can be primarily with what words others in the past have used for the things in question. Anyone who has sat through a conference or a class like that can see how words can be a distraction from reality.
Furthermore, sometimes we may be concerned about beginning with words because we think words have no stable meaning or we think that what we can express in words is just somehow subjective; sometimes even we may be led to think that words in different languages can be so different that some peoples could never understand each other. If this were true, either of words or expressions or whole languages, then it would be equally true of any other symbolic system we might hope to use. Likewise, if languages were so different as to render it impossible for one set of language speakers to understand the speakers of some other language, then it would equally well be impossible for those peoples to learn from each other or build together. Some languages would, in a certain sense, be impenetrable by others or completely or partially uninterpretable. But it is false that speakers of one language cannot learn from those of another language and it is a fact of experience that there are no uninterpretable languages.
What is right in this skepticism about the primacy of speech, however, is the centrality of the thing as what we are trying to know and the simple observation that considering speech as such will not itself be sufficient to consider the thing in question.