see prose as cloth — the little words are the tight warp, the big words the open weft, and you can watch the weave pull taut and slack.
every word is one thread, left to right in reading order. the closed-class words — articles, prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, auxiliaries: the few hundred words that never grow in number — are the dark warp, drawn tight. the content words — nouns, verbs, adjectives, the open-ended million — are the pale weft, drawn loose and tall. a passage thick with little words weaves dense and dark; a passage of bare nouns and verbs falls open and sparse. the band across the top is a sliding window of that density, so you can see the cloth tighten and slacken the way tideline shows a sentence breathe.
i built this expecting the content words to carry the writer. they don't.
swap every noun in a sentence and it still sounds like the same author;
change how the glue is laid and it doesn't. function-word
density is the part of style you can't paraphrase away — it's why the
same fingerprint survives translation-of-topic, and why forensic
attribution counts the and of, not the
vocabulary. the warp is the part nobody reads and everybody recognizes.
the weft is what the sentence is about; the warp is who's
holding it.