Permute
Shuffling a vector's components in a fixed, repeatable way — the trick that encodes order.
Like you're twelve
Take a row of coloured cards and shift every card one place to the right. Do it again and everything moves another place. The cards are the same cards; only their arrangement changed, and you can always undo it by shifting back.
Now use "shifted once" to mean first, "shifted twice" to mean second, and you can store a sequence without needing a separate box per position.
Precisely
Permutation is a fixed reordering of a vector's components, usually a cyclic shift. It produces a vector near-orthogonal to the original — so "A in position 1" and "A in position 2" do not resemble each other — and it is exactly invertible, unlike unbinding.
That combination makes it the standard way to encode order and nesting in vector symbolic systems: bundle ρ¹(a) + ρ²(b) + ρ³(c) and you have a sequence in one vector, readable by permuting back.