You could be right in that point. It is a logical thing that when a woodsman goes out to chop a bunch of sticks, which can be of course including as much as 1-2" boughs, that bringing it back home, it would have to be tied up, to stick on the horse or to carry it. It would also make sense then, to bind the axe into it as well. Thus the meaning of a bundle of sticks over the door of the oval office is doubly suspect.

As for numbers, numbers have a meaning, which you can discover by reading about number theory and topology. Especially the most primitive numbers, the prime numbers. If you can consider each number a word, then the process of producing the non-prime numbers combines meanings same as stems, prefixes and suffixes do with words. Order of numbers in mathematical functions can be critical too, hence the grammar of order of precedence, which is a way to save drawing brackets around things to show the tree structure of the grammar.