Re: 'together vs. to gather'

Roger Mills wrote at 2004-01-17 18:40:19 (-0500)
 > I'm with Philippe on this matter.........
 > Doesn't even a depiction of a magnetic field involve _multiple_ things
 > arranged around a central point?  (I'm thinking of what appears when you
 > take a sheet of paper with iron filings, and put a magnet underneath it--
 > (what would it look like if there were only _one_ iron filing?), or
 > depictions of the earth's magnetic field, in which the poles are the foci).

Well, yes, that's what I said.  A depiction of a magnetic field
involves multiple things.  But the depiction is not the field.  At
every point in space around the magnet, the flux has a certain
strength and direction, which vary continuously.  The field is still
there when you take the filings away.

 > >
 > > I'm not sure convinced either way as to whether "gather" implies
 > > plurality.  I would suggest that it's language-dependant... I
 > > mean, there are a lot of subtly different usages of "gather" in
 > > English, and it seems to me that some of them imply a kind of
 > > plurality, even when used with mass nouns, and others don't.
 >
 > Can you come up with some examples, especially where an idea of
 > plurality _isn't_ involved??  I don't think it's language specific;
 > it's inherent in the meaning of "gather"-- (intrans.) to come
 > together, (trans.) to bring (cause to come) together.
 >

"water had gathered in the ditch"
"gather the cloth together and tie a piece of yarn around it"

It's possible to quibble, and as I say I'm not entirely convinced one
way or the other.  Does water gathering in a place imply that it was
previously composed of a plurality of seperate entities?  I'm not
sure.  And with the cloth, you could say that a plurality of points on
the surface of the cloth is being collected together, but that would
seem to make any verb denoting deformation of an object imply
plurality.