A label, in some sense, is little more than a sticker. You could replace it and the thing would remain. Human naming is asked to do more. We teach a child a name so that the child can call for the thing, ask about it, distinguish it from what it is not, promise it, and be grateful for it. We argue about names because a bad name will send the mind to the wrong object or to no object.
Note what happens when someone says “never mind the words, just look at the thing.” He is still using words to point. He has no choice. Some things you can pick up and give to another person but most things you cannot; and most of what we speak about, which are various aspects of things, are not the sort that can be picked up at all; for example, we can point to the color of an apple but that's all we can do to that color as such. We can speak, write, draw, and number; and drawing and numbering are already kinds of saying. The method that says that we should skip the name is itself a name for an act, a certain act of ignoring words; and it works only if the hearer already shares enough speech to know where to look. If one completely ignored words, one would be unable to speak or hear.
If words were only labels such that I pass one to you and all you need to do to receive that word is receive the sound, teaching would be impossible. A lesson is not the transfer of a physical object from one mind to another. Teaching is speech in which two people come to mean the same thing by the same words, well enough to go on; the student's mind has to understand what the teacher means, not just take in the physical sounds of the words. When that fails, we do not say the two persons have different labels for the same thing. We say the student has not yet understood the teacher.
Our concern here is mainly to set the direction of our inquiry. So, we do not consider the relation between names and things. But the key as we will see later is that a name is a sign.
The account of words, concepts, and things is in the foundation, at How a word reaches a thing, What kind of sign a word is, and One name, many things. It is drawn from Aristotle and Aquinas, with Walshe, Andres, Houser, and Maritain as guides.