In my native language, words come from triliteral roots which have no lexical affiliation with nominal and verbal categories. The spelling's a little weird, but the derivation is there all the same. So much for the Whorfian analysis. Scientists persist in using terms such as 'time', 'gravity', 'numbers' and 'light' without being under any sort of illusion that these are concretes. It is the fact of the abstraction inherent in these concepts that allows us to understand reality better than we could were we limited to concretes.
Time is a good explanatory paradigm for a phenomenon in reality.
So is language. Dr. Lamb knows that there is no such thing as a 'thing'. All our concepts, in the cline from concrete to abstract, consist of somewhat arbitrary boundaries that we place on the continuum of the reality out there. A breadbox is more concrete than time. But neither conceptualization is dictated by objective reality.