The first Mac named its menus with nouns and filled them with verbs, so every pick finishes a sentence. Forty-two years on the Finder still parses. Most product menus don't.
A screen can look good and still be hard to read. I wanted to see where the reading part of interface design started, so I opened an emulator and looked at the menus on the first Mac.
So I booted System 1.0. Five menus across the top: the apple, File, Edit, View and Special. Inside them, Open, Duplicate, Get Info, Put Back, Close, Print and Eject. Cut, Copy, Paste. Clean Up, Empty Trash, Erase Disk.
The titles name a thing. The rows inside say what to do to it. File, then Duplicate. Edit, then Cut. The habit is older than the Mac. The Apollo guidance computer's keypad had two keys marked VERB and NOUN, and the crew drove it by pairing one of each.
Here's a menu I've shipped versions of more than once. Right-click a document and get five rows: Details, Link, Version History, Folder, Trash.
It looks fine. It's short and every word is a real feature. Then read it as someone about to click. Does Link copy the link, open it, or turn sharing off? Does Folder open the folder or move the file into one? Does Trash delete this document or show me what's already deleted? Each noun is a question, and the reader answers it by clicking and finding out.
A noun in a menu makes people guess the verb, and they guess with the mouse.
The Lisa team wrote the rule into their interface guidelines: first select the thing to be operated on, then choose the menu item. Object, then verb. The selection is the noun, so the menu is free to be all verbs. Something is always selected, and the row finishes the sentence. System Disk, Get Info. Two files, Copy.
The verbs version above uses the Mac's own words. Copy Link says which of the three things happens. Move To… says the file is going somewhere, and the ellipsis says you pick where before anything moves. Get Info took the row that said Details and tells you what you'll get. The menu is a few letters longer and nobody has to guess.
Mostly, and the way it changed is the good part. Flip between 1984 and today with the same menu open, then mark the verbs.
File, Edit and View still open the bar, in the same order. Get Info, Duplicate and Eject kept their names and their shortcuts, ⌘I, ⌘D and ⌘E. What changed is that the verbs grew objects. Copy became Copy 2 Items, and Undo became Undo Move of 2 Items. Once a selection can be one file or forty, the row repeats the noun back, so you know what the verb will touch before you let go.
View still has no verbs at the top. by Icon became as Icons, and neither means anything until you read it after the title: View by Icon, View as Icons. The title and the row are one sentence split across a click.
The Mac broke its own rule on day one. Special is an adjective. File, Edit and View took the obvious commands, three were left over, and Miscellaneous was long and ugly. Two of those three could wipe something for good, Empty Trash and Erase Disk, and Special told you to slow down before you'd opened it.
Go flips the grammar. Its title is the verb and every row is a place. Go, Downloads. It still reads as a sentence, and that's the rule under noun and verb. A navigation menu is nouns because it's a list of places, and that's right. A command menu you open with ⌘K should start with the verb, because people type what they want to do before they name what to do it to.
Most menus I see in reviews get judged as a shape: the radius, the padding, the shadow, the hover. All of that matters, and I spend days on it. The words are what tell someone what happens when they let go of the button, and Apple had them worked out by 1984, on a one-bit screen with no colour to hide behind.
A pretty menu with the wrong words is a well-set sentence that doesn't parse.