Re: 'together vs. to gather'

Philippe Caquant wrote:
> The "action of collecting": what is it else than
> putting several things together ? That there will be
> any result or not does not change the meaning of the
> concept. To start collecting and get nothing just
> means than you started the activity of collecting
> several things but it somehow failed. You don't start
> gathering, or collecting, with the aim of getting
> nothing, neither just one item.
When applied to mental processes, "to gather" means
to infer (usually in response to a single statement), and
"to recollect" means to recall a single memory.

And this isn't just a quirk of English, or even of various
Indo-European languages.  It probably goes back to
humanity's long history of living in hunting-and-gathering
societies, where the process of gathering food generally
entailed both digging it out and piling it up,  so that the
concepts of "digging out" and "piling up" were entwined.

We figuratively dig out an inference or memory and,
by so doing, we gather or (re)collect it.  Similarly, we
collect a debt -- another single thing -- by digging it out.
(I could give more examples, but I think that's enough.)

--Tommie