Scientists are concerned with definitions, hypotheses, papers, and teaching as much as with experiments as such. We must be able to state our general truths and even describe our measurements or else there is no science or data in any meaningful sense.
Consider what actually happens after we obtain an experimental result. Someone must say what was counted, in what units, and under what definition of the thing in question. “Significant,” “control,” “error,” “cause,” “species,” “energy”: each of these words and many others like them are presupposed in the sciences. Someone who treats words as secondary will still use them, since he has no choice; and he may well find that he sometimes uses words without noticing when they have stopped meaning what he assumed they meant or, even worse, when he has lost the precise sense of what they do or should mean in a given context. But, of course, this does not mean that a person who is not adept at language cannot study science; it only means that adequate skill in language is a requirement for doing science, even if detailed study of grammar is not, but, nevertheless, the detailed study of language, if done well, will only increase the scientist’s capacity for expression and precision, to say nothing of his ability to persuade others.
It is worth noting, however, that simply knowing grammar and the meanings of the words is not sufficient for practicing the relevant science. It is easy to know the formal definition of work or kinetic energy, but it is another thing to understand them deeply; that only comes from practice using and applying them. This is because the implications of the given definitions and how they relate to other concepts are, as in many other disciplines, not obvious to someone with little experience.
If we treat words as secondary we will not find that science completely fails to produce data or theories. Rather, we will find that we cannot say precisely what the result was, cannot tell one kind of definition from another (for example, a descriptive definition from an essential definition), and cannot easily see when a mathematical expression or a graph is somehow doing the implicit work of an argument.
Without the arts of speech, without being able to articulate the meaning and interpretation of the results, any scientific method becomes something like a knack for doing some particular task and it cannot give us any sense of what the knack really consists of or why it works.
Nevertheless, it is also true that much actual science is carried out precisely this way, by following the example of a mentor and working scientist, by experimenting with instrumental setup, and not necessarily primarily by employing definitions and arguments at every stage. Even such practices, though, have a goal and a direction, they have an end that they are aiming for, and that end is the discovery and articulation of truth. Thus, the arts of language are at least necessary as an aid and instrument of the sciences.