Davar spans the semantic range English splits: a word spoken, a thing or matter, an affair or event, an act. The devarim of God are both His words and His deeds; the Ten Commandments are the aseret ha-devarim, the ten words, which are also ten things done. Genesis 1:3, and God said, let there be light, and there was light, is the root at full voltage: the saying and the being are one verse, no gap between utterance and execution. When the Septuagint and John needed Greek for this, they chose logos, and the word-thing unity thinned into philosophy.
The tradition built on the root polices the tongue accordingly: lashon hara, evil speech, is ranked beside bloodshed because words are things, objects that land; the Shema is said aloud; vows are unbreakable because a vow is a deed already done. Isaiah 55:11 states the engine: my word that goes out from my mouth will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I purpose. The word is not a message about the mission. The word is the mission, self-fueling.
The claim: English speakers keep rediscovering dabar and renaming it, performatives, manifestation, reality programming, because the language itself enforces a word-thing split that makes speech-feels-like-action seem supernatural; the power of the word is a translation error. Verdict: partially true and partially inverted, the split lets English distinguish lies from events, a feature dabar pays for in ambiguity. But the recurrence is documented: every generation's manifestation culture is dabar smuggled back in through the quantum door. The root waits. It has been waiting since Babel, which is, of course, also a dabar story.
If the word is also the thing, what exactly did God say first?