Lacing, sewing, weaving—all of these are arts which produce a structured fabric of some sort, a textile which stands as a context for both use and significance and the pleasure that attends both. Interestingly, the words textile and context are linguistic twins; both, along with the word text as well (note the –xt combination in all of them) are derived from a Latin verb meaning to weave.
To speak of structure, however, is immediately to imply order, arrangement, and design, an intentional geometry of measurement and shape whose stability allows the changeable to find a place without veering out into formless chaos. From this, an instructive comparison can be made, I think, between some of the dimensions we learn about in geometry—point, line, and plane—and the elements of language—word, phrase, and clause. Both disciplines produce designs and structures, geometry of planes and solids, language of sentences and paragraphs. In both, these stable structures allow the flow of feeling and emotion, like marrow in the bone, to remain focused on the significance they mean to represent. Geometry does so in its dimensionality, language in its ramification.
A geometrical point has no dimension, not having developed yet into length or breadth. It marks only a position in space. Analogously we may say that a word, a noun, only names something in the world, and in that sole capacity is as still and stationary as the geometrical point. The geometer’s line has one dimension, length, and so does the grammarian’s phrase, a group of words related in some way and extended out from one word, as a prepositional phase stretches from a preposition to its object. And it is the geometrical plane that next takes on two dimensions, adding breadth to a line’s length, just as the clause adds a verb to the word, delimiting an idea as it lays out its surface, its predication.
This curious association between geometry and grammar can be seen, surprisingly enough, in the common derivation of the geometrical term parabola and the literary term parable. Both words arise from a Greek verb meaning to throw beside, the common idea being that in putting or placing things beside each other, we can find meaning in their comparison. In the parabola, that bowl-shaped figure we see in the shape of a rainbow or the trajectory of a ball thrown into the air, we can compare and find equal the two sides of the area of the path covered at the axis point between them. Likewise, the purpose (or shape, so to speak) of a parable is to compare the characters and events of a story with philosophical or religious ideas they are meant to represent. Common to both applications is the notion that what is being figured signifies an ideal elsewhere perfect but in its manifestation here only approximate.
And herein lies, perhaps, a connection between geometry and grammar. The elements of point, line, and plane assemble themselves according to reason into solids of all make and manner, such as sphere, cube, and prism. Likewise do the linguistic elements of word, phrase, and clause combine fittingly to build sentences of varying shape: simple, compound, and complex. The geometrical solid is the linguistic assertion; both are configurations whose integrity of construction determines how well they say the meaning they originally intended to communicate. That meaning is ideal; we see it with our mind’s eye. But once we undertake to translate it into materials of stone or wood or words or phrases, we begin the risky work of creation, knowing in our bones that the finite can never pin down, never contain the wild infinite. But therein lies, after all, the play of art, the delight of making things—by design.
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