Why do Strings behave like a Collection?

Mostly I love Groovy but every now and then some behaviour gets on my nerves. For example, why do the iterator methods on String behave as though it was a collections of characters rather than an Object? If I define a method with a dynamic-typed parameter like:

void printNames(names) {
    names.each {
        println it
    }
}

Passing a collection of Strings results in each String being printed. Passing a single String results in each character of the String being printed separately. I would have thought that the Object behaviour was a more appropriate default here (iterators on Object are called once passing the object itself). After all the .chars property is available if you really want to represent a String as a collection of characters.

The solution is to override the method:

void printNames(String name) {
    printNames([name])
}

Unlike in Java dispatch to such overridden methods in Groovy is based on the runtime rather than declared type of the parameter.

You might think this is a trivial point, but the scenario that keeps biting me is HTTP parameters passed into a Grails controller. If you have multiple inputs with the same name, or a multi-select then sometimes params.x is a String and sometimes it's a List of Strings. Any code dealing with that parameter has to handle the two cases separately.