Two directions is not enough
If you found it, you almost certainly built a square: royals along one row, ordinary people along the other, males in one column and females in the other. Nothing snapped, because each bond had its own direction to live in. Royalty and ordinariness separated up and down, male and female separated left and right, and the two no longer competed for the same one.
That square is a teaching model, not a claim that meaning really has a tidy "royalty axis" and a "gender axis." What it shows is that more directions mean more relationships can hold at once.
Which raises the obvious question. Two directions handled two kinds of relationship. Real language carries far more.
Think about everything dog is close to, and why it's close to each:
- to
puppyby age - to
wolfby wildness - to
catby being a pet - to
barkby sound - to
loyalby temperament
That is five relationships, and the square has room for two. So do what worked last time: add another direction.
Age needs somewhere to live, and both directions on the page are taken. So lift the flat page into a box, and let words sit nearer to you or further away as well. That is a third direction, at right angles to the other two, and each word now needs three numbers to say where it is. Wildness needs a fourth. Sound needs a fifth. The recipe never changes, and neither does what it costs: one more number per word, every time.