How does language affect cognition? Is it important that most of our concepts come with linguistic labels, such as car or number? The statistical distributions of how such labels co-occur in language offers a rich medium of associative information that can support conceptual processing in a number of ways. In this article, I argue that the role of language in conceptual processing goes far beyond mere support, and that language is as fundamental and intrinsic a part of conceptual processing as sensorimotor-affective simulations. In particular, because linguistic association tends to be computationally cheaper than simulation (i.e. faster, less effortful, but still information-rich), it enables an heuristic mechanism that can provide adequate conceptual representation without the need to develop a detailed simulation. I review the evidence for this key mechanism – the linguistic shortcut – and propose that it allows labels to sometimes carry the burden of conceptual processing by acting in place of simulated referent meanings, according to context, available resources, and processing goals.