Language · An experiment from 1980, made operable

Relevant Is Something You Do

In 1980 the quantum physicist David Bohm tried to rebuild English so that it could not hold still. He called the result the rheomode — the flowing mode, from the Greek verb rhein, to flow — and he built it because he had come to suspect that the sentence itself, subject–verb–object, was quietly teaching everyone who used it that the world is a warehouse of separate things. This page makes his experiment operable: run his derivation engine, melt the verbs frozen inside ordinary nouns, weigh the languages that really do run on verbs — and then let the page tell you, in rheomode, what you just did.

Bohm spent his career on quantum theory, where the deepest trouble is that the world refuses to come apart into pieces — measure one thing and another, far away, is already implicated. His book Wholeness and the Implicate Order argues that the fragmentation we experience is not out there in the world but manufactured — and chapter two names a chief suspect: grammar. A sentence like “the observer looks at the observed” has already decided, before anything true or false gets said, that there are two standing objects and a little bridge of action between them. The structure ships with the verdict built in.

So Bohm did something almost no philosopher of language has the nerve to do: instead of writing another argument about the problem — in the very grammar he was indicting — he built a small working alternative and invited the reader to run it. Not a new language, he insisted: an experiment. The question he set himself, verbatim: “Is it not possible for the syntax and grammatical form of language to be changed so as to give a basic role to the verb rather than to the noun?” (p. 37). Put the verb at the centre, let things appear only as moments of acts, and see what it feels like to think that way.

Movement I · The engine

Seven verbs, four moving parts

The rheomode begins with verb roots for the primary acts of mind — attending, perceiving, ordering, seeing-truth, making. Each root then runs through the same small derivation machinery: re- (the act done again, freshly, in a new context), irre- (the act failing to fit — done where it no longer answers), -ant (the state of the act fitting), and -ation (the continuing whole of the activity). That is the entire grammar. Its point is not vocabulary but motion: in the rheomode you cannot mention attention, perception, or truth as finished objects — only as acts currently underway, fitting or failing to fit.

Choose a root; choose a form. Every form Bohm himself published in chapter two carries a green badge — and the engine on this page regenerates each of those forms letter-for-letter from the same grammar (the check at the end counts them). Forms the grammar licenses but Bohm never printed are badged amber: they are our extensions, running his machine past the last page he wrote.

The first root is the master key. Levate names the spontaneous act of lifting anything at all into attention. Do it again, in a fresh context, and you re-levate the content. If the lifting fits the moment — if what you raised actually answers what is going on — the act is re-levant. If it persists past its fit, it is irre-levant. Read those last two words again without the hyphens. Bohm has walked you, in four steps of a toy grammar, straight into two of the most ordinary words in English — and they have changed on arrival: relevance stopped being a property and became something someone is doing.

Movement II · The thaw

The dictionary was on his side all along

Here is the move that turns Bohm’s coinage from cute to uncanny. He did not conjure levate from thin air: he dug up an obsolete English verb, “to relevate” — to lift into attention — and restarted it (p. 42). And the etymology he was banking on checks out independently: the living word relevant really does descend — through Medieval Latin relevantem, into Scottish law in the early 1500s — from exactly re- + levare, to lift up again. The act he wanted the word to name is the act the word was coined from, centuries before him, and then forgot. His experiment begins as an exhumation.

And “relevant” is not the exception. It is the rule. English abstract nouns are, again and again, verbs that stopped moving — acts poured into Latin participles and left to set. The paragraph below is written in ordinary academic English, the most noun-thickened register we have. Every underlined word has a verb frozen inside it. Click a word to thaw it and watch the act it was carved from step back out, with its source cited.

Honesty requires the counter-panel: not every noun melts. We went looking for refusals and found them. Thing descends from Old English þing, an assembly — the deliberative meeting, as in Iceland’s Alþingi — so it is a frozen parliament, not a frozen act, and its deeper verb root is speculative. Language is Latin lingua, the tongue: a frozen organ. And noun itself is Latin nomen, “name,” a noun all the way down — the tempting link to gnoscere, “to know,” is a documented false association. The thaw is a strong pattern in the learned Latin layer of English, not a law of nature — which is worth saying plainly, because Bohm’s own point was about what grammar tends to do, not what it must.

Movement III · The field check

Languages that really do this — and the myth that isn’t one of them

Bohm wondered in print whether any natural language had taken the verb-first road. The honest answer, from the linguistics of the century since, is: some come remarkably close — and the most famous example the internet will hand you is the wrong one. Four cards; the tags tell you which is which.

One chronology matters for honesty, because the pop version reverses it. Bohm invented the rheomode in 1980 from inside physics and philosophy — not from any indigenous language. The famous meeting came later: around 1992, in a dialogue circle convened with the physicist F. David Peat, Bohm sat with speakers of Algonquian languages — among them the Blackfoot philosopher Leroy Little Bear — and learned that verb-based grammars of process and flux were not a thought experiment but somebody’s Tuesday. Little Bear’s characterization of Blackfoot as, roughly, hundreds of variations on “to be” is his evocative gloss, reported through Peat’s Blackfoot Physics — we pass it on as attributed paraphrase, not as a grammatical count. The rheomode was not borrowed from these languages; it was independently, imperfectly, reinvented toward them.

Movement IV · The experiment reports

What you have been doing, in rheomode

Bohm’s deepest claim about the rheomode was not that anyone would adopt it. It was that doing the derivations — even briefly, even playfully — produces something prose cannot: a proprioception of language. You feel your own noun-machinery move, the way you feel a joint you never notice until it clicks. A chapter can only describe that. An instrument can cause it. So: this page has been quietly counting your acts since it loaded — in this browser tab only, going nowhere, dying when you close it. Press the button and it will hand your own session back to you, narrated in the rheomode.

And Bohm’s own verdict? He never declared victory. The chapter’s closing sentence, in full honesty: “Whether it would be useful to go further […] and to try to introduce the rheomode into active usage, it is not possible to say at present, though perhaps some such development may eventually be found to be helpful” (p. 60). An experiment reported as an experiment — which is precisely why it can still be run.

That closing joke — a page conjugating its reader — is our extension, not Bohm’s, and we mark it so. But the grammar it runs on is his, and the numbers in the report are real counts of real acts. Which is the whole method of this place, and the reason the rheomode fails as prose and lives as an instrument: you cannot be told that “relevant” is something you do. You have to catch yourself doing it.