this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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Risa
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Come on'n get your jamaharon on! There are no real rules—just don't break the weather control network.
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Through idiomatic usage, dampener has taken the same meaning as damper, but as my dynamics professor was fond of saying, one of them terms means to slow motion, the other means to get something wet.
Heh, unfortunately there's no fighting linguistic evolution. I'm a descriptivist so I can happily skip those battles – ie. I think a language is defined by a description of how it's used, compared to prescriptivists who think that eg. grammars and vocabularies prescribe how a language should be used.