Everything in mathematics can be seen from a "meaningless" perspective. In some sense everything from algebra to complex analysis can be stripped of meaning by thinking of them as just "a rearrangement of symbols according to a set of arbitrary rules".
And, somewhere, that's really all they are.
It's only once we apply an interpretation to these operations that they become "math". Same with numerical rearrangement. Just because it seems like it's just a algorithmic manipulation doesn't mean there isn't an interesting interpretation of the meaning somewhere.
To be pathological, take the phrase X2YZ to mean "X + Y = Z if X < Y and Y - X = Z if Y > X" and both 1234 and 3241 are true. Now that manipulation suddenly has a whole lot of (silly) meaning.