Interesting analogy. Only after reading this comment did I realize that my mental model has been somewhat similar. Although if I had to write it down, I'd phrase it in terms of data structures.

If you have a sparse matrix of nouns and verbs where cells show whether a given verb(noun) pairing is valid, indexing by noun is clearly more efficient, because most of the time you know exactly what you're operating on, but not necessarily what the operation you want is named. The variables are likely right there before your eyes, a couple lines above the cursor, but the functions are spread out all over the code base.