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This shows them as interchangeable for either use? What am I missing here?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/damping
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dampen
Historical use, vs evolving English use.
Just like literally is now figuratively.
Oh, that makes sense. Usage creep bothers me, too. Especially the "literally" thing. I know gatekeeping is unpopular, and linguists will tut-tut you for being prescriptivist. But some language shifts are just fucking dumb and make people sound dumb.
This is literally the opposite of what happened. "To damp" was used to mean "to moisten" in the 1670s, a hundred and fifty years before "dampen" started to be used for it also in the early 1800s.
As with many if not most of the pedants in this thread, you're dying on a hill that's actually just straight-up wrong.