A question of curiosity

[hasbeen]

You seem to be responding to everyone except me on this topic, and that's fine, you have no obligation to respond to everyone, but I find it curious.

What you're describing is exactly how language change works in every language that's ever existed in all of history. That's what I've been trying to get across. It's why we don't speak the same language the writer of Beowulf spoke, or the same as Chaucer, or Shakespeare. If a majority of people use a word a certain way, who are you to say they're "misusing" it? Dictionaries only aim to describe how language is used - at the end of the day, words are all arbitrary, and the goal of communication is to understand each other.

Again, jargon in technical contexts is important for clarification of the terms being used, but you can't extend the jargon into regular, everyday speech. Jargon is also specific within a certain field - the same word in biology may be used completely differently in a chemistry context. Neither one is using it incorrectly unless they're trying to apply the meaning from one field into the other one.

I minored in linguistics, and what you're saying is an extremely common misconception about the scientific study of language by those who don't study it.

But I'm not going to dictate how you use language. Just trying to share how people who study language approach these situations for the edification of others

No worries! It's just a pet peeve of mine, probably similar to your pet peeve about damp vs dampen! Can't resist a conversation about linguistics. I'll bow out too... Back to the topic at hand!

 

[jdjk7]

Any reference(s) you can share for this derivation?
[To be specific: I wouldn't be at all surprised that there be recorded "p" -inserted variants of Middle English "damnen" < Old French "damner" (from Latin "damnāre", long ā); quite a bit more so, however, at the claim that "dampen" too (as opposed to just "damn") directly derives from them.]
All sources I've checked agree that "damp" and "dampen" are etymologically related.

I was recalling trivia I learned studying Latin in school, but I may be misremembering something. (At the very least I can't recall my declensions correctly...) "Damp" was given as an example of an English word with complicated etymology, in this case, one sense being Germanic and the other sense being Latin. From what I can look up right now on EtymOnline, "dampnen" existed as a variant of "dammen"/"damnen" from epenthesis of that -p-, same vane as the variants "hampster", "somepthing", etc.

Lexvo/Wiktionary says something similar, but (naturally) lacking attestation.

(I also don't have a linguistics degree, just a lot of time and an Internet connection.)

 

[Tim Skaggs]

Merriam-Webster stopped being an English dictionary long ago. Sad but true. They subscribe to the thought that languages evolve (devolve??). That's how the word "impact" became a verb and now we're saddled with silly words like "impactful".

"Common Errors in English Usage" Invalid Link Removed

In a piano, that's why they're called "dampers" and not "dampeners". They "damp" the strings.

Apologies to the OP for going off-script and my apologies to you for being so punctilious. I'm just a grammar and composition nerd. Ask poor Jeff Genzler and Agedhorse.

No argument from me, but these organizations generally agree with Merriam-Webster;

• American Heritage Dictionary
• Collins Dictionary
• Cambridge Dictionary

These and several others list their first or second definition of the word dampen using these phrases: to deaden, to depress, to make less strong, to make less lively, to stifle, to make a sound or movement less loud, to make less intense, smother, reduce, dull.

To be fair, their first or second definition is also to make wet or to make moist.

The Oxford English Dictionary has four definitions, first is: to make something less intense, lively, or effective, or to reduce the amount of moisture in something.

OED dates the use of the word dampen with this meaning to around 1630, (260 years before the founding of Washington State University), so perhaps there has been a significant level of evolvement (devolvement?) from the original meaning. No apology needed for being punctilious. It’s not a terribly rare characteristic.

 

[YourGuitarist]

Because it suppresses oscillations which give us overtones. The overtones "die" first vs. the fundamental. The fundamental creates more energy than the overtones so they remain longer.

Here's an experiment. Plug your bass into a tuner. Solo the neck pickup and watch how the tuner "warbles" as it tries to find the fundamental. Now, solo the bridge pickup and do the same. The tuner will settle more quickly. The string is stiffer over the bridge pickup and producing less overtones. There's more string excursion over the neck pickup which creates more overtones.

The string is less stiff, more easily deflected at the neck pickup than the bridge pickup. My experiment is to tug the string at the neck pickup until you can't pull the string further, then note the distance between where it is tugged to from where it rests. Do the same right over the bridge pickup. You will see that the string can travel a further distance from rest when pulled over the neck rather than bridge. THIS IS STIFFNESS. Greater excursion implies less stiffness.

The bridge pickup would be considered more harmonically rich with overtones as the relative amplitude of the overtones is greater compared to the fundamental for the bridge pick, thus explaining its brighter sound. The mid/treble forward sound of a bridge pickup is due to its harmonic richness.

The fundamental remains because it is the natural frequency tuning of the system. The string pluck is comparable to a dirac impulse which has an infinite harmonic series, theoretically the brightest signal possible. The string accepts that impulse with an excess of overtones and filters it to a darker sound as the string cannot move fast enough to capture those upper harmonics in the impulse. The lost harmonics might be thought of as transferred energy to the natural or resonant frequency of the system.