"Here's a verb: 'ask.' Always a verb, can't even imagine being a noun."

VERBS	NOUNS	ADJECTIVES	ADVERBS
run hide eat crawl ask	table desk soup	blue hard square itchy	slowly quickly venomously

"Here's a noun: 'peach.' Under the right unusual circumstances it might explore its adjective side, as in 'peach pie,' but its principal orientation is as a noun."

VERBS	NOUNS	ADJECTIVES	ADVERBS
run hide eat crawl ask	table desk soup peach	blue hard square itchy	slowly quickly venomously

"But what about 'moan'? When you're moaning it's a verb, but when you let out a moan, it's a noun. Okay, you say, so we'll line up our words in part-of-speech columns, but in between the main columns we can have little Kinsey scales for these half-noun, half-verb kind of words."

VERBS	...	NOUNS	ADJECTIVES	ADVERBS
run hide eat crawl ask	moan	table desk soup	blue hard square itchy	slowly quickly venomously

"Still, if you counted up the occurrences in English literature of 'moan,' you would find that it had a predominant orientation. It would more often be one or the other, a verb or a noun, right? 'Moan' has a preference. I don't mean to rain on your parade, but 'rain' can be a verb, an adjective, or a noun. So parallel columns aren't going to cut it, but we can make word clusters at the vertices of a triangle, with nouns, verbs and adjectives comprising the three corners."

				nouns
			(desk, table, soup)
			/		\
		       /                 \
                      /                   \
                  verbs	------------- adjectives
            (run, crawl)		(blue, itchy)

"Some words go along the edges, and words that can act as all three parts of speech go somewhere in the middle of the triangle."

 
                                nouns
                        (desk, table, soup)
                        /               \
                       /                 \
		      /	     rain        peach
		   moan			   \	
                   /                        \
                  verbs ------------- adjectives
            (run, crawl)                (blue, itchy)

"The distance of the words from the corners is determined by the frequency with which they are used in each context. All of language is a plane right? Well, now, take the word 'fast.' You fast on Yom Kippur, then you break your fast in the company of a fast woman, and drive home fast together to her place. That is, 'fast' can be a verb, a noun, an adjective, or an adverb. If you make your triangle a square, you're not defining unique points anymore.
"Maybe you need to go beyond the Cartesian plane for this. Maybe you need a third dimension," [a sphere!] "and some of your words are going to end up inside the freezer. Now take all the words in all the languages on earth, and try to represent them on a simple graph. You're going to need a lot more than three dimensions. You're going to be in hyperspace in no time." Hmmm... a bouncing spinning sphere, moving through time as well as space? If Barbie thinks math is hard, gender must be hell for her!

"If language is impossible to represent linearly or to categorize neatly, how much more complex must be our sexuality, which may be the only domain of the brain more creative and more quintessentially human than language? For after all, linguistic expression is limited by the range of words and inflections, but sexuality is limited only by the imagination that created the words in the first place. So even if phonemes aren't discrete, and linguistic combinations might not be finite, sexuality has got to be a whole different order of infinity from language. Sexuality isn't a continuum along a line. It's more than a plane, and more than a space. It's so complex you can never categorize it, and from my perspective, the categories are just one more role play in which people indulge so they can get off in shorthand."