An asset of English is that it has a grammar of great simplicity and flexibility. Nouns and adjectives have highly simplified word-endings. This flexibility extends to the parts of speach themslevles. Nouns can become verbs and verbs nouns in a way that is impossible in other languages ...

McCrum et al., The Story of English, 1992

This flexibility accounts for a sliding and flexibility of meaning, too. When I had to translate a theoretical text about gender into German recently it was sometimes difficult to find the appropriate structure. The English text worked with this ambiguities between word classes where it was not always clear if a word was a noun or a verb. In German you have a comparatively rigid grammatical structure that has to be followed. So the meaning is fixed and rigid, too.