All 13 verbs at a glance. Click any verb name to jump to its full entry.
How the system looks at the world.
| Verb | Definition | Society's Noun |
|---|---|---|
| Scanning | Wide-aperture threat-detection; attention sweeps the environment, tuned to friction, change, or ambiguity. | The Anxious Person, The Worrier |
| Locking | Fixation; the perceptual field collapses to a single point, dropping all peripheral context. | Driven / Obsessive (target-dependent) |
| Drifting | Uncoupling; attention refuses to land on the immediate physical environment. Energy-saving disengagement. | The Slacker, The Daydreamer |
How the system behaves when it hits a wall.
| Verb | Definition | Society's Noun |
|---|---|---|
| Forcing | Linear pressure; treating the environment as a solid object to be battered down through sheer willpower. | The Hero, The Fighter or The Stubborn Fool (outcome-dependent) |
| Spinning | The loop; high effort, zero distance traveled. Rehearsing, circling, chewing on undigestible input. | The Neurotic, The Overthinker |
| Bracing | Rigid boundaries; the system tenses up and violently rejects outside inputs to maintain its shape. | The Avoidant, The Lone Wolf |
How the system interacts with other systems.
| Verb | Definition | Society's Noun |
|---|---|---|
| Merging | Permeable boundary; the system destabilizes its own baseline to match whatever it is near. | The Codependent or The Empath |
| Echoing | The mirror; energy bounced directly back — a perfectly symmetrical reaction bypassing internal state. | Reactive, Thin-Skinned or Charming |
| Tilting | Leverage; the subtle shift of context rather than the application of force. The quietest verb. | Rarely named. Invisible. |
The stories the system runs to make sense of raw data.
| Verb | Definition | Society's Noun |
|---|---|---|
| Projecting | The "If/Then" story; the system tethers to a future condition, and when achieved, projects onto the next. | The Ambitious or The Never-Satisfied |
| Fixing | Pathology; the system treats itself as a broken machine requiring endless maintenance. | The Self-Improver, The Seeker |
| Performing | The mask; constant internal surveillance, terrified that the real self will be exposed. | The Impostor, The Fraud or The Charismatic |
| Architecting | Building frameworks and refusing to dwell in them. The builder who never moves in. | The Architect, The Systems Thinker |
| Frequency | Verbs |
|---|---|
| Heavily named (multiple nouns per culture) | Scanning, Locking, Fixing, Performing |
| Moderately named | Drifting, Forcing, Spinning, Bracing, Merging, Projecting, Architecting |
| Conditionally named (label depends on context) | Echoing |
| Rarely or never named | Tilting |
Pattern recognition by a pattern recognizer. The only lever. Not a pattern-we-mistake-for-a-person, but the capacity that sees all the others as verbs.
Noticing is not in the lexicon proper because it is not a pattern mistaken for an identity. It is the ground on which the lexicon becomes readable. You cannot tilt what you cannot see. The first verb is always Noticing.